A bursting sun unrolls / 49
A window washer / 168 A woman’s voice emanates / 225 A yellow jacket stings her eye / 267 Addicted to Jesus / 277 After binging / 72 Afterward he wondered / 15 Again the taut monofi lament / 92 Against my will I rip / 121 Am I more like steel / 67 And He shall judge between many… / 373 And how the head responds / 103 And now ere we part / 363 And that was that / 222 And the two romantic lovers / 84 And they that shall be of Thee / 354 And this little piggy squealed / 80 And when I pulled a ribbon fi sh / 21 Another toothy smile / 203 As I review my conduct / 374 As the lord taketh I kick / 201 Assume a keen and precise perception / 93 Bastard seeking bastardess / 186 Because I am extraordinary / 305 Because I demand to be worshipped / 226 Because I love I invent love / 244 Because you pleasured him / 116 Beheaded twitching slaughtered… / 339 Behind every holocaust / 128 Better to go unloved / 299 Bitch, cunt, slut / 194 Brick began, one / 123 Bugs fl y off hand / 178 Bumpkee, bumpkee, bumpkee / 76 Cassanova told me / 198 Chastisement as prayer / 127 Clown death, Bozo death / 334 Come into me and / 138 Comfortable with the concept / 313 Confessions of a lunatic / 97 Crows scrape through / 115 Cut the tip of my fi nger / 32 Dear and most of all venerable / 118 Dear and venerable king / 134 Dear God I wish to register / 171 Dear God, give me love / 255 Dear God, speak to me / 215 Dear God, thank you / 100 Dear Mother, murder Daddy / 176 Dearest and most wonderful supreme… / 259 Dearest God, veal, my female genital / 159 Do not cram that stillborn / 991 Do you think, do you really / 332 Dogs don’t seem to comprehend / 243 Doll wrestles the wet packed / 112 Double double toil and trouble / 75 Each molecule of seawater / 63 Elfi ngton practiced love / 185 Everybody fucking everybody / 206 Everything I say he repeats / 227 Everything misses the point / 252 Everything’s sloppy / 325 Except the Lord build the house / 375 Executions: sawed-off to face / 229 Experimenting with the concept… / 297 Exploded charred heart / 133 Extract and examine human uterus / 231 Fall back upon the formula / 193 Finally, one comes to nothing / 256 First I destroy the cat / 289 First I prepare / 83 First I razor free / 177 First we plunge knife into dog / 180 Fish scales fi lling / 59 For an aphrodisiac / 61 For he satisfi eth the longing heart / 351 For my next, ladies & gentlemen / 109 For thirty years’ service / 327 Fucking the Virgin Mary / 40 Gently but authoritatively / 13 Give me preference / 234 Go ahead, steal behind / 265 God and Father we have entered / 360 God and God of our fathers / 349 God and I, I punch / 151 God dwells in partially digested / 340 God has a glisten red / 101 God the sissy / 164 Gof the griffi n / 136 Half gnawed, raw black / 58 He ceased to eat / 156 He departed without food / 86 He needed something huge / 140 He thinks she worships him / 316 He throws himself / 326 He wanted to seduce her / 79 Head burst on fi re / 126 Hear oh Israel the Lord Thy God / 352 Hello, I’m Gordon, I’m a sex addict / 172 Help me say the word / 142 Huey, Dewey, and Louie / 135 Humans love to fuck / 238 Humility and its corollaries / 218 Husband and wife privately vow / 293 I adore you but hate your presence / 298 I am in love with my daughter / 249 I beg to interrupt / 323 I blow lizards off brick / 200 I break my own heart / 148 I bronze my sins / 204 I commit the virtue of lying / 239 I compose a shocking poem / 197 I consume Internet porn / 268 I crack open my father’s mouth / 214 I create God in my image / 182 I dislike establishment poets / 245 I do not hate Jews / 292 I don’t want to appear sentimental / 47 I don’t want to be friend / 333 I down bottles of Ipecac / 274 I down the water hard / 39 I drink until black out / 338 I eat my nervous system / 144 I eat myself / 207 I erect a shrine to my member / 270 I failed—poet, husband, father / 212 I fasten with bolts / 258 I fl ip it upside down / 173 I fornicate with myself / 296 I give myself a colonoscopy / 281 I give myself an award / 132 I give up on the whole fucking… / 155 I go searching for Satan / 251 I had an affair / 77 I have decided I will do this / 74 I have never loved anyone / 188 I have nothing cataclysmic / 280 I have nothing to say / 262 I have shorn and given to you, Delilah / 150 I herewith pronounce you / 337 I hold the keyboard upside down / 269 I impregnate myself / 208 I invent a machine / 321 I laugh satirically / 317 I lay my penis on a chopping block / 210 I lay on carpet and spread legs / 341 I learn that Hitler was a necrophiliac / 324 I like the feel of cutting / 30 I loathe myself / 170 I love the women I beat / 230 I love those people / 66 I love you is storm / 276 I masturbate myself bloody / 275 I masturbate to fashion photos / 179 I need a god, I become a champ / 319 I operate alone / 328 I pluck our baby /29 I pray for myself / 181 I pretend you’re a fraud / 174 I reach into the liquid ball of fi re / 89 I remember coming upon her / 44 I return as a raving hag / 343 I say to myself / 65 I set ablaze Q-tip torches / 307 I shove Daddy into Mother’s cunt / 314 I shut drawers / 306 I stare at you mercilessly / 145 I starve my two dogs / 287 I step toward dissolution / 161 I strip the raised vein / 68 I swallowed a quarter / 98 I tell a stranger / 41 I tell my adult kids / 310 I think of nobody but myself / 278 I want to pour children / 17 |
[I want to thank you for what you did…] / 165 I want to write something fabulous / 302 I wish I could do that / 322 I would like to go / 11 I, monstrous son / 192 I‘m wedged inside my mother’s cunt / 303 I’m fascinated with the concept / 216 I’m going to make you pity / 279 I’m not satiated, I want more / 257 I’m not sure, I have no idea / 253 I’m not your man / 152 I’m profane / 219 I’m unparalleled, I’m God / 336 I’ve got fi ve chances left / 154 I’ve stopped thinking about / 50 I’ve taken fl ight / 25 I’ve witnessed mother’s vagina / 283 If I could stick my tongue / 26 If I have to take this crap / 104 In the distance a dog / 196 In the fi nal scene innumerable arrows / 315 In the meantime pagans rampage / 330 In the penis colony / 24 Infant smashes against wall / 263 Insignifi cant cretin / 247 Insignifi cant, trivial, meaningless / 233 It is the epoch of corporate / 33 It is unimportant to me / 191 It’s okay, that ubiquitous / 304 It’s time for humans to lie / 48 Jew haters invade / 301 Just fuck the man / 220 Lambs and apologies / 175 Last night sprouted / 95 Left eye, right eye / 71 Let us pray, then / 190 Let us pray, then, for everybody needs… / 248 Let us rejoice in the light / 377 Let’s say your son / 96 Like a fi eld of soybeans / 27 Like as a father pitieth his children / 376 Like the stars by day our beloved dead / 372 Look, man, what do you want / 240 Man distracts woman / 146 Men and women hate their lives / 184 Men desire beautiful women / 266 Men don’t kiss / 285 Men want to fuck God, not women / 183 Miniature dog like an electric razor / 308 Money and God duke it out / 108 Most amiable and loving beast / 137 Mr. Knuckles worked me over / 166 Mugwump, misanthrope / 211 My father and Irving / 34 My ideal mate / 147 My lover’s lips are razor blades / 217 Nihilist, at age sixty / 264 None of us added up / 294 Not even porn gets me hard / 295 Numerous possibilities present / 246 O God of holiness, Thy knowest / 369 O Lord, keep my tongue / 365 O, Thou who dost reveal Thyself / 358 Obscenities cleanse / 224 Oh Popsy-baby / 23 Oh yea, yea / 318 On this Sabbath of remembrance / 356 On this Sabbath of repentance / 370 Once again I praise devouring stomach / 242 One again the bombing planes / 73 One cannot help but exclaim / 237 One learns to eat one’s dog / 202 One spends one’s life / 329 One wants to rage at the ill / 300 One would predict / 107 Ooh, this bed’s hard / 114 Open unto us, O God / 353 Poetry the poison / 187 Pumping, I slam / 250 Quickens the heart when son bashes… / 260 Razor teeth fi sh swim / 111 Religion breaks out / 120 Remember us unto life / 378 Sack of shit topped with head / 209 Said aliens raped her / 309 Sander takes off skin / 122 See me slice down / 19 Sewed two cat heads / 81 She adores her tiny teeth / 153 She hacks the base / 57 She pours her belly / 69 She’s asleep, I’m painting her body / 221 “Shove it up your ass,” / 241 Simultaneously, I fuck a woman… / 344 Singing, I spin / 335 Smeared across God’s face / 131 So here you are in my room / 189 So I’m watching Oprah / 42 Something he covets suspends / 311 Son has tripped / 70 Starvation terrifi es / 254 Step outside your body / 113 Stomach hurts, stuffed with wheat thins / 331 Stopped my mouth with cement / 90 Suicide being wisdom’s pinnacle / 236 Sylvester smashes into frying pan / 290 Tears cold stone lid / 124 Testimony of the best pig / 160 That’s a laugh, laughing head off / 320 The big puffer sucking / 106 The bird cries it way / 88 The borders melted / 117 The brain revives like a movie monster / 223 The dependable ecstasies / 235 The glorious night / 85 The great massive thing / 105 The iron slides across the blouse / 91 The Jesus kite / 139 The Lord is my shepherd / 362 The momentous event is upon us / 228 The monsters bent and demented / 158 The noblest act is the act of self-hatred / 271 The right side of me cries / 46 The spook on my lap / 62 The sun will not rise / 149 The whole fi sh skeleton / 87 The whole thing goes kablooy / 273 The young one bathe the lapis of love / 199 There might have been a hurricane / 38 Therefore, hast Thou, O Father / 364 These are the grotesqueries / 78 Thine everlasting arms, oh Lord / 355 This is me, here’s my face / 163 This phrase sees, this one clucks / 213 This time god, I’m / 157 Three o’clock, brain aches / 205 Thy bestoweth loving kindness on all / 359 Thy rod and thy staff / 368 Tightly they backed / 53 To cement her surrender / 282 To lay a sheet of light / 12 To you who mourn the loss / 367 Today he awoke with apples / 143 Today I will die for a cause / 169 Today the sun births / 195 Two steel balls attempt to kiss / 261 Verbal directions are horrid / 129 Voice of a lunatic / 110 Vulgar poet, disgusting egotist / 141 Watching professional ice hockey / 54 We beseech Thee, O Lord / 357 We come into Thy house, O Lord / 371 We have turned aside / 348 We run backward / 102 We sanctify Thy name on earth / 350 We thank Thee for the life / 366 Well, I heard about / 56 What have I done, I’ve murdered / 167 What shall we say before Thee / 347 What spectacular sky / 284 What was dinner time / 36 What, he desires me / 119 When storms of oppression beat down / 361 When the bullets zinged / 82 When the gut growled / 64 When they pry apart / 162 While I masturbated / 312 While petitioning God to fi x my cancer / 288 Whom should you loathe if not yourself / 232 Wielding a cigarette with a needle / 342 Wind ripped rain blows / 125 Without consciously knowing it / 35 Words in manuscript conspire / 272 You suck, you make me sick / 291 You’re weary of me / 286 |
Maybe the novel is a good medium for “virtual poetry”—is itself a kind
of virtual poem. There are influential accounts of the novel that
argue it emerges when the conditions of possibility for poetry have
been lost. Like in Lukács: the epic unity of experience that was
supposedly available to Homer has passed away, and the novel emerges
as the dominant literary form of a world in which meaning is no longer
immanent. Insofar as we experience the novel as something that emerges
out of poetry’s impossibility, I think the former is haunted by the
latter: verse is a present absence in its prose. So that’s one source
of my interest in the novel’s relationship to poetry, how the novel as
a genre is inextricable from the banishment of poetry to the realm of
the virtual.
The idea of the virtual seems to apply to all domains of human
experience, not just to novels and poems—the inevitable disappointment
of the actual due to the awareness of a virtual. But what if one
suppresses the virtual? Or attempts to experience and communicate only
the virtual? Adam realizes, at one point, that his relationship with
Isabel… let me find it:
depended upon my never becoming fluent, on my having an excuse to
speak in enigmatic fragments or koans, and while I had no fear of
mastering Spanish, I wondered, as we walked past the convents and gift
shops, how long I could remain in Madrid without crossing whatever
invisible threshold of proficiency would render me devoid of
interest.
Is Adam’s feeling of fraudulence simply a self-aware desire
to want to communicate only the virtual, to allow others a greater
potentiality? Is this a basic human desire? Do you think Adam is only
fraudulent in his fraudulence, as he considers at one point?
I don’t know. You’re right that Adam believes his relationships
are virtual: that Isabel, for example, is interested in him primarily
because she intuits from his fragmented Spanish depths of intelligence
he doesn’t really have—or at least claims he doesn’t have. He thinks
of himself like a mediocre poem in that sense: that she projects onto
him what she thinks she discovers. And he lies a lot in order to
amplify his mystery. But it turns out that his projections of her
projections are off, that his conception of how virtuality functions
in their relationship is inaccurate, and the vision he’s constructed
comes crashing down around him. So his attempt to ground his
relationships the way he grounds his aesthetic has some painful
results.
One problem with cultivating the virtual in relationships is that it
can produce solipsism—you end up relating to your image of your
relationship in a way that blinds you to the actual relationship.
Can anybody ever fully avoid that play of projections?
To a certain extent you can’t. All relationships involve what
we’re saying Adam is doing—they involve a social performance based
upon our projection of what the other is projecting, a virtual
component that can be a source of excitement, whether anxious or
erotic. So there is also a sense in which Adam’s awareness of the
virtual is a heightening of experience and not just a denial of
experience: a way of “experiencing mediacy immediately,” to use the
phrase he uses while praising John Ashbery. So it’s ultimately very
difficult, at least for me, to know when Adam’s obsession with the
virtual is ironically a way of going deeper into the actual reality of
his life.
The sentries walk down the roadway ; the dredgers stab them and push them in the canal: blood bubbles in the back and mixes with the black water. The rebels run up the emergency staircase, they invade the dormitories, they brain the supervisor sisters in the alcove curtains ; they throw themselves heavily on the orphan girls, vomit on the pillow, slaughter ; the corroded, chipped, encrusted blades make freakish wounds on the throat, on the belly of the orphan girls; squeezed at the throat, scalped ; they scream: their mouths, their nostrils spit, their nails pierce the rebels’ wrists : one of them winds a supervisor in her cubicle’s curtain and he clubs her with the dormitory’s crucifix, then, tearing off the Christ’s head, he drives it into the supervisor’s cunt : the thorn crown tears the cunt’s labia ; the rebel’s arm gets tangled in the supervisor’s underskirts.
Khamssieh’s hand, weak, crushing tarantula in nostril : venom hardening forehead ; fingernails scraping cold blood around nipples ; pulling dead tarantula, pinching sticky legs, out of nostril, pushing crushed spider between buttocks ; exhausted elbows dropping onto heaps of floor-cloths : penis contracting into shriveled scrotum ; odour of sodomy wafting through room ; rubbing of jeans, farts : regular in dawn silence.
In my first novel, just published and probably soon to go out of print, since it is miserably bad, I fail to live up to the promise, however weak, suggested by my last book, if you could even call it a book, which has a regrettable title and almost no memorable scenes at all. That book was a full-blown failure of its own kind, so maybe I have failed in two entirely different ways, although I doubt it. Any interest or response the first book provoked was likely due to pity on my behalf, which I probably encouraged. Those readers who did make it to the end routinely reported a kind of exhaustion they had rarely experienced before, at least not while reading. The book was called an “endurance test” by one reviewer, and was likened to a “grueling sporting event.”
The new book has many characters, but none of them ever really comes to life. They seem like concepts with attributes attached to them, and that’s exactly what they are. They were always just concepts, and it relieves me to admit it. I had no other idea how to create a character, and I’ve never known. By the end of the book, if we make it that far, which we probably won’t, since much of this book is tedious and tough-going material, as indicated by several early reviews: “the prose often sounds like a badly written instruction manual.” We don’t care much about what has happened (although very little here can be said to happen) and we can’t really feel for all of the characters who die. Even when the characters die slowly, and we watch them die, on their backs, out in a big field that I call “The Tucson Room” in the book, and listen to their last words, which are often self-pitying and inert, I am not capable of making readers care.
I had thought that having all of my characters die slowly would make readers think of their own impending deaths, and that this feeling might constitute a kind of pity or empathy. It seems clear now that the implausibility of the Tucson Room negates any emotional engagement. It’s not a realistic scenario, nor is it believable when dying characters can suddenly speak a foreign language just before they expire. I see it now pretty clearly, and I agree with the reviewer who called the characters hollow. This was almost too generous a criticism. Even as those characters were all dying out in the field, I could not resist trying, and then failing, to be funny. My own needs were more important than those of my characters, I guess, and I made it clear by trying, and failing, to be funny at their expense.
To be honest, I never once thought I could create sympathy for characters, even though I wished I could, which makes it all the more unpardonable that I wrote the book in the first place. Some better self-awareness at the time might have reduced my persistence at a task that was clearly beyond me. Why would I write a book if I knew I could not write a book? It’s a dull question that should not be pursued. Wanting to do something in writing never seems to confer the ability to do it, at least for me anyway.
I have to admit that I never felt any real connection to my book. Many days, and sometimes weeks or months, would go by without me doing any work at all, although I regularly lied to the people around me if they ever asked about it — I would be finished soon, work was going well, I felt really excited. I only ever wanted to be thought of as someone who was writing a book, which is a fairly horrible desire to live with when one cannot actually write.
The book itself was a burden and a chore from the beginning — it may be the most unnatural thing I’ve ever tried to do. I could only manage excitement for it when I was not working on it; whenever I sat down to work, the excitement vanished. It was like trying to love someone you’re just not attracted to, like trying to have sex with a gender you don’t care to have sex with — not that it’s particularly easy to love someone you are attracted to, or even to have sex with them, which I know can present many complexities, but it’s easier, and can feel right and rewarding on some days, not that I lately know how a good relationship feels. This is what I did, or tried to do, for the six years it took me to “write” this book, even when I wasn’t writing it, which was most of the time.
I did not feel right during those days.
I don’t expect anyone to care particularly about my failure, but sometimes we might look at an ill-conceived or dull book, such as my own in this case, and wonder what the author was thinking in writing it; how something so colossally boring and ponderous could come into being. It makes us think what strangers we are to the other people in the world, when these people can muster enthusiasm for something unfathomably trite or lifeless, as I think I have done. I’m here to tell you that I was not thinking much, or feeling much, which is obviously the problem, and that if I could not muster any enthusiasm while writing the book, it is exceptionally poor taste on my part to expect anyone else to do so. My only thought in writing this note is that this review of my own novel is possibly the one honest thing I might be capable of writing — unless, you know, I screw it up.
It seems that failed writers do not often provide an account of how or why they failed. I’ve been aware ever since I started writing that I usually seem unable to write anything that sounds even remotely true; right from my first sentences a heavy sense of contrivance sets in; not really dishonesty so much as artificiality. Maybe this accounting of my novel’s lack of interest might be the first sincere thing I’ll have written.
For those of you who have already seen the thin gimmick behind the book, I regret appropriating the names of my parents and attributing my own writing to them. I regret it, although it doesn’t much matter now. This seemed funny to me at one time, I guess — to say that some of the writing was written by them — but no longer, and to top it off my parents are not very happy with me right now. They’re not unhappy, exactly, but they just seem remote towards me, a bit indifferent, and we’re going through a strained time, which seems even worse because none of us will acknowledge the strain. At least, we’re behaving politely toward each other, which we have oddly never really done before. They rightly do not understand why I would use their names alongside such monstrous, albeit hollow, characters. Particularly the tall, menacing character I call “Kevin,” who frequently slaps the parent characters with a boiled rag, usually knocking them down, shouting at them while they sputter on their backs.
Am I accusing them, passively, of being monstrous and hollow parents? I honestly am not, but I have lost the authority to make that claim. People will inevitably think, if they bother to draw any conclusions, that I am writing about myself. What was really accomplished by trying to be clever in this way? Not much, I can assure you. I have no defense.
The whole enterprise might be a lesson against cleverness itself, at least as attempted by a not-so-clever person who is aging and growing fat and has no hair and can hardly move in the morning because he seems to be precociously arthritic, which can be alarmingly unattractive to anyone who might deign to date him, I can assure you. I do not present this information for your pity. It is just true. My wrists ache, and I am often short of breath.
This will appear to be a publicity stunt, some act of perverse wit. I guess anything I say at all will always look like some kind of ironic, attention-getting maneuver. I regret that. If I could write a sort of O.K. novel, and then just leave it at that, none of this would be necessary. I just feel sorry to have led anyone along. If there is any wit on display here, which I have been unable to detect, I apologize. If I have been unintentionally funny, I apologize. If I have over-apologized and appeared narcissistic — presuming outside interest in the ways in which I cannot do things, the degree to which I have failed — then I am sorry for that, too. I mean it. Maybe I wrote a bad book so that I would have something more concrete to apologize about. Just another bad attempt to keep attention, which I do not deserve, focused on me. I cannot sustain that attention, nor will it be rewarded. It seems that even my remorse can manage to be self-serving. You won’t hear from me again. If you do, you are entitled to use your hands to stop me. You may use force and feel justified. To see to it that I stop. To smother my little, miserable self.
It would be best for all involved.
All poems are about bombs and all
poems are about soup.
You’ve got soup in your head and soup in your hart
yes the male ungulate you’ve got soup
the hart gallops over the secret land.
Let’s hope he gallops quietly
and that the mushrooms are too.
Silver paths in the moonlight.
I read a book about mines and my hart
is black and white wild gold
miming someone is it mine?
Black faces
fall.
Western dance begins with its feet firmly planted on the ground whereas butoh begins with a dance wherein the dancer tries in vain to find his feet. What has happened to the tucked-in feet?
What has become of our bodies?
I'm convinced that a pre-made dance, a dance made to be shown is of no interest. The dance should be caressed and fondled; here I'm not talking about a humorous dance but rather an absurd dance. It must be absurd. It is a mirror which thaws fear. The dancer should dance in this spirit.
In other forms of dance, such as flamenco or classical dance. the movements are derived from a fixed technique; they are imposed from the outside and are conventional in form. In my case, it's the contrary, my dance is far removed from conventions and techniques... it is the unveiling of the inner life.
When one considers the body in relation to dance, it is then that one truly realizes what suffering is: it is a part of our lives. No matter how much we search for it from the outside there is no way we can find it without delving into ourselvers.
"We are broken from birth. We are only corpses standing in the shadow of life. Therefore what is the point of becoming a professional dancer? If a man becomes a laborer and a woman a servant, isn't that enough in itself?
That is the essense of butoh - and that is how I lead my communal life.
We should live in the present. We should do what we have to do now and not keep putting it on the long finger as the majority of adults do. That is why they exhaust themseves. For children, there is only the present. They are not afraid. Fear envelops us in a fine mesh. We must remove this mesh.
We should be afraid! The reason that we suffer from anxiety is that we are unable to live with our fear. Anxiety is something created by adults. The dancer, through the butoh spirit, confronts the origins of his fears: a dance which crawls towards the bowel of the earth. I do not believe this is possible with European dance.
Butoh plays with time, it also plays with perspective, if we, humans, learn to see things from the perspective of an animal, an insect, or even inanimate objects. The road trodden everyday is alive ... we should value everything.
Butoh is a corpse standing straight up in a desperate bid for life.
Again and again we are reborn. It is not enough simply to be born of the mother's womb. Many births are necessary. Be reborn always and everywhere. Again and again.
I keep one of my sisters alive in my body when I am creating a butoh piece, she tears off the darkness in my body and eats more than is necessary of it -- when she stand up I sit down compulsively.
When I begin to wish I were crippled --even though I am perfectly healthy -- or rather that I would have been better off born a cripple, that is the first step towards butoh.
Even your own arms, deep inside your body feel foriegn to you, feel that they do not belong to you. Here lies an important secret. Butoh's radical essence is hidden here.
(A carrot revealed to me a crucial shortcoming in my Butoh.) Is what we - human beings not carrots - call memory, really memory? What is memory if not the sum of all those things that have been eaten, erased, eliminated - in a word, all that has ceased to exist? And is not the world made so as to attend to that sum? My views have broadened my thinking in this way. I have no idea on what yardstick our memory was first based. But if we would only annihilate this "memory," then an infinite world would come about where Butoh could find its proper place. Unless we deal with such problems we will only end up worrying about this straitened world - and thus, putting a lock on the door to the universe.
I wrote your suicide note from the perspective of a tree.
In that classic of defences,
it seemed like a good idea at the time.
One is the thing one destroys,
or wants to destroy.
Everyone is everything is nothingness, so say my Buddhist friends.
I think the idea was too obtuse to handle.
I feel extremely at ease when my inner self is not recognized even by myself.
Abraham Lincoln, the poem, set the slaves free and did that really well. George Washington, also a poem, set America free from the wicky King of England, King Fancy-pants. Saint George and Mister Lincoln were nice to each other and never used swear words. Because they were poems, they are both now dead.
People on the road to death are on the path of poetry. Gandhi is an important dead poem. He freed the Indians and South Africans from the King of England, King Fancy-pants Jr. He knew he’d be a poem and wrapped himself in a sheet of paper from the get-go. He was starving, a lot.
See, poetry is so freeing. Poetry is the opposite of kings and their royal family. Poetry is a dead thing.
One day Desmond Tutu will be a great poem because he freed South Africans from Apartheid. Obama will be the first Black Mr. President poem. Obama freed us from having only white presidents but try as he might, he could not free us from having only male presidents--he left that for some other poem. Look in the mirror, is that poem you?
Albert Einstein won a poetry prize for having the best hair. Einstein is already a poem but he’s not a well understood one. Most poems are actually not well understood.
It doesn’t matter if their poem is understood. People don’t matter as much after they are dead but they mean more.
It is important to know that poetry is dead. It is even more important to know it is dying.
Somewhere out there is a new poem dying.
Look in the mirror, is that you?
Eric Eicher is a student of mine. I had to hold my knees the first time I heard him speak. We have no college town here, just the city of Chicago. It is plenty big enough for two like us. I take him up to the lesbian places in Andersonville—tiny restaurants with big bars and bookshops with a healthy selection of one-act plays. Professor Jacobs, he says, there is so much more to the city than I know. His brows rise and his eyes stay awake. I order him German beers that beg to be served in special glasses. The boy's cheeks turn loose to red not halfway through his first Bock. I tell him that a city like this is not about discovery, but timing. In time you will know what I mean, I say. I never know what I mean when I'm around him. He makes me nervous, like I might reach out and slap his face at any moment.
When it's too hard to get on from the past, the best thing you can do is stop thinking, stop trying. Get a hobby, a new cat. Addict yourself to whatever little thing you have found as your grind. Your drink, your pill, your loveseat naps. It can work. You grind into it. And then Eric Eicher enrolls in your poetry class, transfers in a week after the semester starts.
Professor Jacobs, he says, do you take all your students out like this? He seems so naïve until I feel his hand on my knee beneath the table. He is trying a joke to make me think he is not as nervous as he is. He gets a kick out of kissing me in bars. I've held his face by the hot cheeks but never his hand.
Fuck me out, I tell him. I have never spoken like this before, not to anyone. He calls my apartment very adult and it makes me want to change my hair. I push him onto my bed and he scrambles for a sheet-hold like he's scared, but when he's in me he gets it, takes me by the split ends and whips my head around. The lights stay on and everything has a simple dust. That's it, I say, fuck me right out.
A man strangles a woman. She is lifted into the air. Their bodies lit, frozen. These are paintings wobbling on a series of backdrops, actors' heads poking through.
MAN: I'd like to get to know you. If that's okay. I'll fetch myself wrecked by movement. Treasure you about an inch. I'll ruin your sense of alarm. I'm building a home of every sneak you snuck, dude. Where I rid you of bitchiness with a single tusk. You give snippets of approval here and there just to keep me conscientious. (Small explosion). I bow through your moods ready to reply. Are you self-conscious about your body? Spaces don't count if they haven't been torn there. That pussy claps around. An altar for crime, my crimes, mega-plural. They start when I wake up. Approximate the joke. No, someone looking good as you ain't required to contribute. (Explode). I hug you a lot. You get annoyed because I'm kind of silly and your disappointed expectations have turned you constantly quite serious. Cute toenails. I cheat on you with the television. A man does not love outside whatever maximizes relaxation. Screen the socket where my nuts guess. Objective distance quells you. I always keep within my rights. Still, I sleet apologies. (Explode). Offspring, build a roster. Basically garage my expellant. Our chum silent bitch-girl. Her groin is ours recycled. Mmm, sliding contour through feigned darks. We are the proud infectors of a life. My main job: jabber everything's okay. Nothing's been okay since the big bang. Anyway, roll baptismal juice fallow districts from change. Bomb the new. I believe in free assisted suicides for everyone who shakes my hand. I believe outside my house is all pennies. Step back, my hygiene dines on itself. I liposuction our crabs because they touch. You hike into nests. (Her period covers his arm). Aw, love every pain you've had. I swaddle your feces. I'm a flea jockeyed in your stoma twenty-four seven. Pagan in that feed. The testimony of everything right about being alive becomes activated the moment you flinch.
WOMAN: Boy, I'm the calamity being said. Note the sorry varnish. Note your propensity for shrinking. All this would and could. Such male tutelage ralphing its own veneer. Now let me visit gravity as a second pan full of tame spitties spat by saying rawr. You poorly steer the immaculate. You're an ingrown patient beeping his Hot Wheels. Plus, the ceiling's dirty. Plus, I shower in your tools. Hello! I give out the belly buttons here, fuck-flak. Men pass through my prayers throat-banged by mountainous clit. Meanwhile, your every succinct point gets clenched through my halo. When I rip loose our little boy he's going to wear each dress I hate until his peener swabs the deck. I keep snoring through the trial they'll give me for his death. Men who best themselves at love equal unvacuumed fetus I've yet to huff. Oh, and all silence is not stoic. Yours feels practiced. Set me over by my flowers. They tell me what to do. They span the gimmie gimmie this home constantly booms. This home, this home! I've planned an escape from debt so fucking long I've learned to despise whoever hands me gifts. I'll tangle your daydream. We'll pursue drawn-out deaths. My clothes are the only bracket between me and other men. That's why I need so many. I soil myself on purpose for your legacy. Where are all the self-improvement books I keep molesting you with? Why don't their clipped paragraphs line your unhygienic foreskin? But I do enjoy being an object bound higher than maybe television. I have good stories. I'm shiny. I have relatives that hate you and give off radiation. Your unfulfilled needs afford my every strength. Looky-look, I'm your gunky dame, like, bondage is over. I can sit through anything you try. Thus I'm better organized than all beliefs. Not much will do. At least I conquer. All the way Disney.
Man bent behind another, arm inserted to the shoulder.
PENETRATOR: Knock the hum. Out your boo-boos. Juice those jammies. Help the labyrinth hail gloom. Oh, fully your son back here. The buck-most baby left a precipice. You ate something angry. Will Adorno fan the pretty-please? I see heaven and nickels. My knuckle-bones shimmy heinous, such mousetraps, yum, shelters grown cowardly never yawn. I pet pink a muscle, velvety, ravenous, ha. The glow I've been chasing since adolescence let me down. Fast rivets soupfly our knowing. I'm mom twice over. Ha to the strings. Ha to all who scowl behind aesthetics. I stage your surgery mid-air. Born wearing the same hat, we make starving decadent. One last uppercut and love turns us blonde. Fuck the ruler. I am inches crowned. I'm the only stump your function has. Every stretch of ground I've faked walking. Industry in a handful. How's my tickle? Trench the shock further adjectives, slick-ticker. Fulminate platform diabolical hymen, my tin grip, all Frankenstein claiming pets, pet, kitty likes. What's the horrible thing say? A whisper or crouch? Bunch of sanguine fur shitting heresy? My fillings ejaculate gosh-like metals. Mommy won't buy anymore puppets to cripple, help the car keep breathing, fend off those college loans, scooch sweet conjecture. I haven't let ventriloquism mean everything outside our place not my retracting cuticles. Tap, tap, tap, blood pressure's here. He needs a caning from your smoke. Beloved cluck, hammers never shush. I love you lacking stricture. I love you faster than coffee.
PENETRATED: Roadrunner deep, bowels for season, for the cancer I know you are, loping assward through shelter, for that shelter's loss, everyone's loss so always. Bask in my gobble, basketball the gulp sixty kilometers, seventy – the bong you can't share. If you think for a second I will sneeze and break your arm. It will be blown off the planet unloved and sizzle nightly in the sun's paler pussy. Everyone is a ladle for mistakes and I am them. Be the wizard of my dong's removal, because it would take fucking days, then sip near the tippy-hole, going: wishes hurt! What hurts: being groped or being fed? The night you turned over in your sleep and I ran toward you screaming was our last shared experience. I tan your osmosis, dissipating your reach. Careful, there are scraggily broads bicycling the sunset through suburbia like white-flight orbs rewound. Happy worth seeks its kind. Privilege withdraws, especially from me. Still, I am a man unarmed against the diplomacy of his own tang. I am newspaper hollow. Hen fucked. An anti-beard. Be my eyes Mohammedan laughter? Psh. Ask Vlad, nothing manufactured visits my tum. My sonnets victimize the phone book. I'm the kind of friend that comes with technical support. I have arms like a dentist. Ways you can't clobber. I sense fat before I'm near it and smile in any situation. My pre-cum feels vintage. Post like Formica. I speak a thousand languages per sentence. This is working out.
Iris’s egret’s eyes were filming I HAVE NEVER SEEN THE SUN. The scene begins with a vellum sea, then a field of the blurriest soot. A molting asp erodes a ghost’s gowns until the corpse is absorbed. Posthumous clouds counsel the wind, and her pollen resigns from its home.
The sky fermented a cotton tarp. The baffled voiceover spread. Iris’s dove scored itself with scales while owl wool coated the clouds.
A cod ate himself. A cod ate himself and in eating himself dons a clone. The clone burns. The burning clouds. The cod’s cloud burst into throngs.
The Ur-Mane invented a puma mirage. Its ears rang inside its own ears. Stupid purrs. The puma’s image lapsed as it foraged for footprints. The silhouette grew large and it spilled. The puma’s shadow absorbed a horse. It was called The Blur when it stirred.
The scope he used to scan his silhouettes developed latent codes in his eyes. He perceived a tail’s erosion. “I am awake,” he said, “but I think I need to describe myself.” He tried to tell himself what a tongue was. It made a hill of ice, some smoke.
The mouth of the next thing he said came out clear: “I hid my hidden head. It starred.” He claimed it calmed his ghost whenever he spoke to the well of its engine.
He shook the snow from his clothes. No one whispered the destroyed elements which would have framed his silence. “Nothing,” he replied. “Nothing. I just told you my greatest secret.”
When he is sleeping in his sunken bed he lights up latent figures. Though not alone, he knows no more of the beings beyond him than to fear the sun. He recalled being posed. He thought: “I am being posed.”
And though he was perfectly fused from the sunlight, it was not exactly singing, what was seeding inside. As he turned their passages into their seasons, he let them be. He fished his shelves, then poured out the chimney.
A bundle of swollen strangers, he scared them, and all their trebles and springs retreated. He taught his beak to break the aviary open. He called himself Creature and Creature’s Creature. It named the exhaust beneath his nails.
Pupa wavers above the blaze. Spits on slackened harp strings. Folding lichens from ligaments, Pupa’s Spleen blends with a bordering spider. Inters its ice. Pervades the quiet space. Not one tone. Anew. No Pupa now, Pupa says.
Salve the hidden staves, sings Spleen. Nonce cake and kelps grow regal in Pupa, frets Pupa. One big oh. My moon system’s star’s unmic-ed. A tinny non-stinger. Tiger sugar. Three hounded galleons per sea. Spleen lacks animism, says P.
On a secret tuft, Pupa tosses the shifting hour sickness. Its contrast plays off the contrakazoo. A wait note. Boot clay minus Pupa’s toes traces faded shapes. Heavy steppers vent the ceiling until Spleen’s peak can breach.
Pupa and Spleen gander in reverse. Both concluded seeds spread: Me and Moi, a reddened blue. Feelers clear the stage of pulp while false salt impounds the not-bodies. Acropolis dust covers the comb shield’s husk.
An acre of crust connects Pupa’s newt to the outside otter. Building remains from umbilical crumbs, Spleen dives into two mirages, moth and lunar mouth. Pupa ingests the scene through a beak.
Viking was tired and had a sore back because he carried Joshua everywhere and Joshua was very heavy. He carried Joshua all the way to the ocean. Then, after a while, he put Joshua down on the beach and buried it up to its neck in the cold sand. Viking carved a horse into Joshua’s head. Viking had never seen a horse before. This horse stood upright on two legs and had big hands. Viking told Joshua all about the island where the horses made light.
When Viking tapped the tree blood spilled out and made a miniature river. He made a little sailboat out of a leaf and then put some ants on it. He set it gently on the river of blood and gave it a push with his finger. How perplexing a hand is bent on rescue.
Viking was nauseous and tired. Nothing he did to relieve the nausea or fatigue made him feel any better. It turned out that Viking was pregnant. Although Viking was happy that he would soon have some company, someone to talk to before going to bed, he was mostly scared. He did not know how to be pregnant. He did not know anything about having a baby. Pregnancy made him feel like a shell—how another person lives on the inside. He worried about all the space the baby would take up. He worried it would crush his heart with its little baby claw.
Viking had given birth to his little baby father. It was the first time Viking had ever met his father. There were so many things he had wanted to tell his father, so many things to ask, so he spent hours making a list. But his father was just a tiny newborn baby who only knew how to cry and shake, so Viking could not ask him any questions. How do I feed you? Viking started. How do I hold you when you are cold? Viking was not ready to be a son.
When Viking’s father started to speak, he spoke in a written language and he spoke it fluently. One day, Viking was putting crushed-up apples and horse-milk in his father’s baby mouth when he felt his father’s brain vibrate inside its skull, and the skull moved like a bat trapped in the bag of his face-skin, and then his father’s tongue pushed a rolled-up letter coated in the slime of apple-spit. Dear Viking, you are a finite distance from me and I am a finite distance from you and that distance is eternally and hopelessly in flux… is how it started.
Viking tried hooking his heart-veins to his father’s heart but they didn’t take. It wasn’t necessary. His father’s heart pumped its own blood. It pumped and pumped. It kept pumping even when he slept. The pumping was so loud that Viking couldn’t get any sleep. His father was nothing but trouble, nothing but a sequence of loud pumps. He had no choice but to put his father in a boat and push him down the river. But the pumping became a light. From a distance, he lit the night in pulses.
Every night, Viking read The Book of Joshua to his father. It was very large and very heavy. He had to be sure he did not drop it onto his father’s small head while he slept. After his father would fall asleep, Viking would skip ahead. This is only further proof of your badness, he read. This is only further proof of your badness.
It rained. It rained for two months. It rained all over Viking’s father’s face that whole time. Viking bent down to slide the water off of his father’s eyebrows with his finger, but Viking’s father face smeared into a wet rust. Viking thought he saw shiny metal underneath the eyebrow hair. Do you know any jokes? asked Viking’s father. No, I don’t know any jokes said Viking.
Viking secretly built an x-ray machine so he could look inside of his father. It was large and clunky. It looked like a small mountain of cassette players. When he started it up by pulling hard on a cord, smoke billowed from the pipes. It made a black cloud that floated into the sky and hung on the air like a sea cow.
At the mouth of the cave was an actual mouth and at the mouth of the river was an actual mouth. At night, the sky had an eye where a moon should be, and during the day, a tiny cold mouth for a sun. The mouths had big salt rocks for teeth that would crumble together as they spoke. They spoke of religion, teeth-rocks avalanching all around Viking, crushing the trees, crashing into the frozen rivers. They told Viking he was bad and that he should be better. Viking arranged the fallen teeth rocks into little fake churches and scratched out his eyes on them.
Viking put on his shirt and then he put on his pants and then he took off his shirt and then he took off his pants. He put on his shirt and then his pants, and then he took off his shirt, and then, he took off his pants.
Hundreds of therapeutic measures were assumed
After the open source navigation tools failed
Putting a smile on overworked theoreticians
Pacing infinite rooms looking for a solution
You know that we can seek ecstasy
But reach only a mild form of happiness
I feel animals and insects moving
Repeating their original sin: convincing
Time to ask the universe for a sign:
Happy to know that things keep happening
Despite the annoying weather
And asking the bunny for directions
Yaks answer in hope of recognition
Coming and going to the machine of happiness
Having trouble drying up the shower curtains
Rise up pataphysicians of the world
In the exact time for the good news:
So much will still be happening
Always your family locked the doors for alligators. Your family locked the front doors and back doors and the porch screen doors for alligators hissing along the gutters of the streets. Your father propped chairs against the basement door and leaned against the front door with a mud-grayed shovel. Your father lost his job and collected unemployment for those weeks spent against the door with bloodshot eyes. With a drawn gray face he made you fetch drinks from the stock above the refrigerator.
"A given alligator may live a billion billion years," your father would postulate, "so why should a man die by age 75?"
How your father trembled for the scratching, when sober or seeming sober. His old haunted gaze. How the collie dog moaned from some darkened corner. How your mother wept at the occasional bursts of gunfire in the neighborhood. The squealing of truck tires, the tin thunk of alligator corpses against the flatbed.
Your family watched from second story windows as alligators crept from the sewers and the leather factories. Your family watched from second story windows as alligators devoured flower beds and dog houses and crunched the bones and snouts of dogs in the doghouses and swallowed with a terrible suddenness the old women who stooped to pull weeds in their flannel nightgowns, the old women who had not heard the emergency broadcasts or the tornado sirens.
Into the evenings, the hoarse screams of old women echoed within the dank bellies of alligators.
And in the black night how the yellow eyes of alligators trailed like fireflies along the lawns while your father slept against the backdoor. The whisky bottle on his lap and his fat slick lips glazed with booze. How he did not know the long off howling of neighborhood dogs devoured, for the sounds of his snores.
At bursts of shotguns and rifles in the streets your father would say, "to a kill an alligator one must shoot the back of its skull, but I have known many good men killed with shots to" and he absently touched various areas of his throat, chest, arms, abdomen, face.
Your family kept the doors locked for the alligators and through the days your father pressed his ear against the cellar door and listened with chest throbbing. You did not know if you heard the hissing of alligators for the wheeze of your father's ragged breaths.
When the thing is seen it can’t be lost: open door, lips wrapped around a mirror. You swallowed something sharp and now it’s boring. Tearing clothes apart, the new technological cheerleaders learn what it means to be disfigured. Our persons, our web of skin and sloppy hair, come together in enclosed spaces. The world, mostly reactions then consumed. I have a new flavor called flesh. On the park bench you give birth to a sensation not unlike nothing. Anything which isn’t inhaled is not worth having.
You have come into a room to prove the room exists, your mouth full of fingernails, the television’s extent unknown. The study of genitalia makes them pointless, picked clean of mitigating circumstance. Bowline, harpoons through the window, my body a street.
Bleached and starting to pass out, the women in my life hide for years. Objects can only last as new for moments. And then this thing grows and is eaten. The box is another way of detaining art. * When you came out back and asked me to admit it, I wouldn’t admit it, and that’s how you knew. A cell phone in the shower. Our wolf-like boredom gets the best of today.
Remember your father returned home from what the newspapers speculated was “exhaustion of the nerves” or a “delirium” and your mother called, “his terrible melancholy.” Remember the papers reported how your father raved to “persons unseen.” How he fired his revolver at shadows and bayoneted the wind. Remember your father home and how he wore his uniform through the day and into bed and removed his cap only at dinner hour or at church service. Remember your father returned home intoxicated by the advancements in technology lately made. He had watched men alive and coiled within in barbed wire. He had observed their greened and their eyes burst for unseen gases. Remember how your father brought you to a mounded tarpaulin in the backyard and how he pulled this aside to reveal the red machine silent beneath. “The salesman suggested steam powered,” Father explained, “as the fuel is readily found.” Your father, however, had long understood the importance of the combustion engine and had opted for the gasoline machine. “It may not be as accurate or as gentle as that mower you have known but I have found in these years about the land that often the greatest success comes through the methods most brutal.”
The empty room had its own energy. “Algae and bone,” said the device.
Life would be unbearable if we made ourselves conscious of it. Happily we don’t do so. We live with the same unconsciousness as the animals, in the same futile and useless way, and if we anticipate death, which might be assumed, though one can’t be certain, we anticipate it by way of forgetting so much and with so many distractions and subterfuges that we can scarcely say we think about it at all.
So we live our lives, with little grounds for thinking we’re superior to animals. Our difference from them consists in the purely external detail that we speak and write, that we have the abstract intelligence for both distancing ourselves by employing it concretely and by imagining impossible things. All those qualities, therefore, are accidents of our basic organism. Speaking and writing do nothing new for our primordial instinct to live without knowing how. Our abstract intelligence is of no use except in concocting systems or notions about half-systems rather than permitting us to be animals out under the sun. Our imagination of the impossible is not exclusive to us, because I’ve already seen cats staring at the moon, and I don’t know whether they weren’t yearning for it.
1. Baudelaire wants out like I want out–up and out.
2. Baudelaire wants god.
3. Baudelaire is looking for god in opium, hash, morphine and pussy.
4. Baudelaire is looking for god in god.
5. If ______ calls it Les Fleurs du Malles in a soft voice one more time I am going to kill him.
6. Would be cool to be a muse, but only if the poet is hot and good. Otherwise it would be gross.
7. Feel like I’ve only been a muse to yucky people.
8. Feel like if I behaved like Baudelaire it would be acting out.
9. Feel like if I behaved like Baudelaire it would seem stalker-y.
10. Would love to write a L’Invitation au voyage poem for ______, but it would be too stalker-y.
11. Feel like I need a stronger poetry clique.
12. Started calling it Les Fleurs du Malles in my head.
13. Wish Baudelaire wasn’t an Aries.
14. Afraid I am going to start rhyming if I keep reading this.
15. Can reading classic French literature ruin your work or does it always only make it better?
16. Could Baudelaire fuck after he got syphilis?
17. Did they have condoms?
18. Did the women know to pee after sex?
19. What would you do if you got a urinary tract infection? Would you have it forever?
20. People should just be allowed to go to prostitutes.
21. Prostitution should just be legal.
22. It’s fine.
- The tale must contain no stock anthropomorphic monsters: no vampires, no zombies, no werewolves, no mummies, no ghouls.
- Although the tale may contain noir elements, it must not contain stock figures from crime fiction such as serial killers or hard-boiled detectives.
- The tale must not involve a post-apocalyptic scenario, zombie or otherwise.
- The tale must not contain any buzzwords from Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Frank Belknap Long or any other earlier authors of weird fiction. This means no Cthulhu, Arkham, Miskatonic, Necronomicon, Tsathoggua, King in Yellow, Hounds of Tindalos, Carcosa, etc. Distinctive vocabulary associated with the Lovecraft circle, such as cyclopean, eldritch, etc., is also forbidden.
- The tale must not contain elements of Judeo-Christian mythology as operational tropes, e. g. a crucifix warding off evil, conventional demons and/or demonic possession, Satan, angels, etc. It is acceptable, however, for characters in the tale to embrace these concepts as part of their own belief systems.
- Steampunk and all its tropes are forbidden.
- Place is essential. Setting must be as well-developed as any other element of the tale. Scout and employ real locations whenever possible.
- Atmosphere must be as well-developed as any other element of the tale.
- Leave bright lighting and CGI to the cinema: the tale must suggest more than it describes.
- The tale must follow Caitlin R. Kiernan’s dictum: “dark fiction dealing with the inexplicable should, itself, present to the reader a certain inexplicability.
Their language is infinitely complex: they tattoo it on their bodies so they don't forget it, starting on their feet for common phrases in youth and scripting sacred truths and personal histories on their faces, on the lids of their eyes, and on the lobes of their ears. As the intellect begins to develop the head is shaved, and various areas of the skull marked with the traits and characteristics that arrive through maturity. Typically an elder of the tribe will be completely bald, hair replaced by an intricate tangle of points and lines. There is a paste made from tree bark, which prevents regrowth.
Just as artificial sweeteners can be sweeter than sugar, unreal events can be more moving than real ones. There are three reasons for this.
First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.
Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out." This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.
So while reality has its special allure, the imaginative techniques of books, plays, movies, and television have their own power. The good thing is that we do not have to choose. We can get the best of both worlds by taking an event that people know is real and using the techniques of the imagination to transform it into an experience that is more interesting and powerful than the normal perception of reality could ever be.
what is most essential to humanity lies at the point furthest from conventional scrutiny, where it remains inaccessible to minds bent on categorizing and, in the end, controlling it—safe, and sacred, in its unknowability.
Fourier's great word was harmonie, and his perception was that we have made a mess of what we had absolutely no need to make a mess of, that we can live far more successfully in human relations. First of all we must decide on a unit in which to live. He said the family is a suffocating, murderous unit; a biological unit, he called it, for begetting and feeding children, which could be done much better by a “phalanx.” He approved of all the vices. Greed, for instance, could be a marvelous thing. He saw that religion was a childish myth. Yet the Harmony had a church in it, for those people who wanted a church. The church was facing a theater. He felt that somehow the church and the theater were answering the same need. The thing that made him so interesting to nineteenth-century Americans was work. Work should be play; work should be the supreme joy.
He's a very complex person, and of course he is not coherent. There is really no scholar who has sat down and tried to figure it all out. Tony Vidler, a professor at Cooper Union, came to visit once; we had a lovely time talking about Fourier's architecture, which Vidler says is the most revolutionary ever known. Vidler had been to the Bibliothèque nationale, and they'd shown him a room of cardboard boxes. In the boxes were manuscripts of Fourier's, unpublished, unread. They showed him a page that laid out which houseplants you were to put in your windows in the Harmony, 365 days a year. For each day he'd prescribed the appropriate plant.
The whole world, he said, is a correspondence. And everything comes in a chord. The chord contains eight items. The center of the chord is the pivot. At one end of the chord is the avant-garde, and at the other end is the arrière-garde. In a fruit chord, let's say, you have at one end the ripest golden pear, and at the other end is the quince, which never ripens. It remains as hard as a rock. And all of these corresponded with personalities (I've know plenty of quinces). Fourier felt that monogamy is simply one mode in the sexuality chord; I don't think it's even in the middle. At one end is what he calls the butterfly, the man who has to have a different woman every hour. And at the other end is chastity, which he correctly saw as not a denial of sexuality but another of its modes. For Fourier there were people who could live a life perfectly satisfied with a best friend, with whom they'd play checkers, and there was a place for this as there was for prostitution, which he considered a noble trade.
Fourier was constantly saying, “I do not want to change human nature,” while saying under his breath, “because it's impossible.” He simply wanted to accommodate it. Everybody has different desires. And in the Harmony, you have a society that is either tolerant or wise enough to allow for that. One of the really satisfying dimensions is his belief that all children are geniuses, and that in the world we live in we systematically stifle the little Beethovens and Einsteins. But in the Harmony their talents would be spotted, and the little Beethoven would be given a violin. Every Harmony is run by a twelve-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl, and they have to retire at thirteen. I think he was right that at twelve the mind is as bright and intelligent as it will ever be.
He was very, very lonely. There are people who say he had no sex life at all apart from masturbation. He lived with his plants and his cats, and was desperately poor. He worked as a clerk, like Bartleby, in Lyon.
When Albert Barnes was showing his collection of paintings to Horace Pippin, Pippin said, “That Matisse, he put the red in the wrong place.” At a showing of Clouzot's film about Picasso at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, a child's voice could be heard in the audience: “Mama! He's ruining it!” Such sound criticism is hard to come by, and has absolute authority. So there are all sorts of comments about works of art. Maurice Leenhardt said that the intelligible is first of all beautiful. I would say interesting or attractive. I doubt that there are more than two people who can read the first page of Ulysses; that is, give an account as to what's going on, who's doing what, yet it's a beautiful, magical page with as much on it as Rimbaud could pack into a poem. No illustrator could paint it, nor a film depict it. It is a new way of writing, approached afterwards only by Eudora Welty. For all Pound's saying that Joyce's technique was une affaire de cuisine, it's ultimately the technique that's making it all beautiful. Getting the red in the right place.
And it’s only when he discovers the truth, and sees that his self is an object in a world, like all the other objects, that he becomes a painter. Because, for the first time, he is part of the world, and art is his way of confirming that. A way of saying that he is in the world, in the world and of it.
To turn away from the busy world is interesting, up to a point … but to refuse oneself is exemplary. To become nothing, to remove yourself from the frame – that is the highest form of art.
On Tuesdays I like to eat my father. He tastes of venison. Bread dough is what he’s made of. I know he’s really a woman. But you can’t say this to his face or his ees will turn hollow. When the fire is hot and the sun goes down, his dead brother whispers in his ear: you’re a woman. He’s made of bread dough. His nipples are raisins. The eyes of a woman he went to see in prison yesterday were also raisins. My father has black nipples
Everyone is getting divorced because of Facebook. Too much water kills people, destroys old family photographs, causes pets to be left in cages while those who can walk flee their underwater homes, their dead-end jobs and high cholesterol breakfasts. Money ain’t cheap. California hates gay people sometimes. Vermont loves gay people but hates streetlights. Florida loves streetlights but hates education. Texas will stick a needle in you if you murder someone white. I don’t know shit about the Carolinas, except South Carolina didn’t want to screen Amistad because they still wave the Confederate flag because heritage sounds a little like heresy and goin’ muddin’ is fun. Valium fucks me up something awful. I love it. Subaru is the state car of Vermont. Racism is the state thought of Alabama. I have lied to doctors to score Vicodin and it was worth it. I’d do it again but my mother would cry. Monsters don’t exist, but I do and birds do and birds are always in poems because poets like to look out of windows because poets are lonely and poor and looking out of windows is free but cable TV is not free and movies are not free unless you sneak in the back entrance while the usher is busy sweeping up the old popcorn. I have never been shot at. Tupac is alive and smoking cigars in Cuba. I have held a gun once and I felt dangerously unsatisfied. Couch cushions get dirty but no one cleans them. I Febreze my underarms, but that’s not true. I am scared to touch doorknobs because I hate having a runny nose. Watching myself sneeze makes me feel like a vampire. How to exit a car that has crashed into a canal: break a lot of windows. Is it possible to get a concussion from thinking too hard?
A man’s search party walks into canyons and caverns calling out the man’s name; mocking echoes roar from the darkness. A polar bear walks into a bar. A bar walks into a polar bear. Everyone drinks to a freshly frozen man who has silently walked into a lukewarm Heaven.
This morning I took a bath under an open roof. Check it: me, dressed in an immature pond, looking up at the earth – but school taught me to look down on it, so now I know to ask permission. Earth? Sky? Why you be so glass hungry? Why you be so ready to big up everything? Some things don’t deserve cultivation – let’s keep our garden private, just you and me? I live next to a safe-house for the deaf. Last night the thunder came without the big light, I was scared for them – how they know when the rain is coming? I know. I always know. My body holds ninety-two percent of its own water. I stand in the middle of the street – I buoy. I make my mouth a trademark, I lighthouse, I scream “land”, I know bones all vibrate with me. You? You elite. You make me jealous. I don’t get jealous. I wear all the nice things and hide.
ALPHONSE ALLAIS: Marche funèbre pour les funérailles d'un grand homme sourd (1897). The great granddaddy of silent pieces. Allais—something of a cross between Erik Satie, Raymond Roussel, and Joel Stein—is probably best known for pioneering fiction structured on holorhymes, but he was also a composer. Sort of. The first movement of his Funerary March is simply nine empty measures [see the Album Primo-Avrilesque (Paris: Ollendorf, 1897)]. No recording, to date, but a scaled-down version for string quartet was premiered at the FestivalManké (Nice) in 2000, under the direction of Ismaël Robert (who perhaps took a cue from Henry Flynt’s 1961 Fluxus score, which reads: "The instructions for this piece are on the other side of this sheet." The other side, of course, is blank).
ERVÍN SCHULHOFF: “In Futurum” (1919). Manic, anxious silence. The influence of early jazz and dada cabaret songs is palpable in the third movement of the Czech modernist’s Five Picturesques for piano. Though entirely silent, the score bristles with notation: from long, angst-filled tacets to jittery quintuplet rests. The counting is tricky, and with any but the most accomplished pianist it can detract from the work’s potential for emotional outpouring; according to the composer’s headnote, the piece is to be played with as much heartfelt expression as desired—always, all the way through [“tutto il canzone con espressione e sentimento ad libitum, sempre, sin al fine!”].
Taken by agents of the United States of America, Felix Six-Killer grows up at the Carlisle Indian School near Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. His hair is cut and oiled. His shirts are starched and creased. For months he is startled to find himself seated for breakfast at a long table with too many other boys shorn of hair, stripped of beads, feathers, shells, turquoise, coral, sliver, leather, bone. Any reminder of home. Some are rendered mute by the command to speak only English. Felix can speak it, but has little to say. White-shirted and grim, the boys take their morning meal together and make of themselves the best family they can. At morning prayer, Felix folds his hands, bows his head, and instead of giving thanks for the bounty forced upon him, he remembers the story of his birth.
The mother needed to be winterized—that much was clear, yet the family had not prepared. Surprising, as the family was quite responsible. Each member had a savings account, each called home when late, and none left his or her keys in the door. Occasionally the older daughter might land at collections; sometimes the younger neglected an obligatory family dinner, often the father forgot where he was going or why, but overall the family was reliable. Life meant hunker down, prepare.
Preparation took different forms. The older daughter avoided opening her mail or watched porn. The younger kept track of everything in the refrigerator, to whom it belonged and when it expired. The father sold things. The mother gathered their vapor trails as they faded, aligning slips of cloud in her able hands.
“Is your bow your dick?” Gloria asks.
“You’re right, I’m a dick.”
Gloria comforts Carson in Sedona. In Taliesen. Gloria comforts Carson in movie theaters, grocery stores, shopping malls. Carson crying at a very small table. Gloria touches carefully his shoulder. Is Carson more or less sad when he sees rabbits? Squirrels? Scorpions? No squirrels in Arizona, only the million rabbits, the millions coyotes. “We can bowhunt them,” Gloria assures Carson, but she’s not sure. Gloria knows the visible world is only that, visible. To touch anything is faith. Her hand on Carson’s shoulder is not so much a hand as a dust cloud. They are dust clouds. If they make love, their intermingling clouds will mix atrociously. And Carson can’t abide uncleanliness. He doesn’t think that’s a word but he tells Gloria anyway. They’re scrubbing the bathtub, staring up at the fluorescent light as it flickers above them.
In the movie the woman was watching last night, an actress had quoted a famous American author. The movie was French and the actor was French and the actress was American. The quote had something to do with grief and nothingness and the woman was uncertain if what she felt were either. She felt incapable of distinguishing between the two and envied the actor and actress their abilities to recognize a clear distinction and to make a choice accordingly. She envied the famous American author also, but less so.
The woman is holding the knife openly; watching as the crowd moves as one away, disburses to the other side of the room. It is hard to tell one face from another. She can no longer remember the man’s name, only a lingered feeling of forced detachment when she thinks the words: the man. A person says the woman’s name and steps forward. The person is unrecognizable. The woman is unsure if it is her own flesh or another’s that is torn or tearing. When she looks at the crowd they are in black and white and their voices echo a foreign language where previously they were speaking English. There is an air of impartiality to the whole commotion. The blackness of the blood seems vaguely non-cinematic.
The woman sits back on her heels. The crowd is watching and her urge is to throw back her head, open-mouthed. About everything else the woman is still unknowing. In the movie the actor had said grief was a compromise. The actor had laughed. In the movie the actor was always laughing. Sometimes the actress laughed too.
I fake break-up with K so I can rebound with myself. Alone, I fog every mirror with my fake kissing. I am never thinking about the weather’s attitude when I dress for the day, but I am always finding myself offended by the afternoon rain. This is how I feel when I wake up: all lightning like. K writes a novel in my veins. The first line goes You will never have to worry about the wind again. I can’t read the rest, she’s covered it with skin that matches my skin. I tell her Tell me how it ends and I’ll trade you my pudding snack for four Oreos. She goes into the other room and I can smell her smiling at me. Big books scare me so I only read novels that are 472 words long. I am writing a poem called “Rebound Poem” and it’s going to be really fantastic when I finish it.
This morning I sneezed four times while brushing my teeth. Who died in the middle of those four sneezes? The sneezing made my gums feel dirty so I had to do everything all over again. Following my hands is exhausting. I have never survived a tsunami. Iraq is always huffing and puffing but huffing and puffing is less than brick and mortar and heat-seeking missiles. Afghanistan is not a blanket my mother covers me with after I fall asleep on the couch. Today I sneezed four times while brushing my teeth and my borderline personality disorder was angry I didn’t offer it any breakfast. How many people died while I forgot to offer my sickness a slice of toast, two scrambled eggs, a glass of juice filled with vitamin C? That’s a lie, I had cereal this morning. Still, my Valium goes down so quietly I sometimes forget I took it. I rarely think about my medicinal veins, my dystopian thyroid, but today I am thinking about my dead sister. She’s so small she fits in a shoebox though nobody calls her coffin a shoebox. It is just easier calling it a coffin.
Last summer I murdered an eleven year-old boy. He said his name was Helge Holmlund from Hebberhshålet in Upper Kågedalen, north Västerbotten. We met at an urinal in Tivoli just as Men's Night was closing in on Children’s Day. He struck me as the quiet, frail type – and it was love at first sight. I took him home, and after he’d performed certain choice services, I tied him up and locked him in the soundproof cellar I use for these occasions.
For six whole days he gave me exquisite pleasure. After that, I hacked his body into small pieces, wrapped the meat in plastic, priced it and distributed the packages to a number of different display cases in and around Skellefteå.I kept his head for my little collection.
While I was burning the boy’s clothes and other things, I found a hefty stack of old wallpaper samples tucked in his ratty leather backpack. Each sample was covered with a child's erratic, immature hand, and the words were written with different colored pencils. As I made my way through a few of these fragments, words utterly failed me. A brave new world opened before my eyes – one of vile pleasures and terrifying abominations – with the power to touch me in ways I no longer thought possible. Chuckling at his impudence, weeping at his tender sentiment, trembling with sorrow, paralyzed by hate – I sorted these rough fragments and organized them into offensively seductive stories, each one presumably written by the dead boy.
My philological training proved extremely useful in tackling the difficulties posed by these unusually precocious recollections, which the boy had misleadingly entitled, In the Winter of Life. I also made discrete inquiries into the poor boy's past, a quest that took me far off the beaten path and into the dark and looming Norrland woods, home to more terrifying legends than any one person can take in. I wandered on muddy paths through a rough landscape. On both sides of the Kågeälven, the dark river, the earth is fertile and the view open. I could see dirty gold barley fields, resilient swaths of hay pasture, run-down farms and hopeful new patches of almond potatoes, all stretching away before me; there were graying Västerbotten farmhouses in various states of decay, though clumps of willow trees and stands of birches tried to hide the worst of it. Each of these farmhouses is set well back from the road and has a long approach leading up to it. It’s obvious the folk in these parts want to know who’s coming; they keep to their own. Nonetheless, you can still find a few beautiful old Västerbotten farms scattered here and there: dark red timber buildings with white doors, small porches and shingled roofs. For the most part, though, faded brukshusen – practical farmhouses, each one identical to its neighbor – have taken over. The empty cow barns (which the locals call fusen) have long since been abandoned. Now they use silos. Around these parts, there's a church for every ten homes. In short, everything's so modest and respectable you just want to shout "Celebrate cruelty and cunning!" to the heavens. It’s only the old folks who are left out in the country, though in the loosely populated regions of Ersmark and Kusmark a few communities still try to scrape by: making condoms for Skega and crying buckets of tears outside the barred churches. Mystery has been driven from the forests surrounding the riverbeds. Winter in these parts is hard. Blizzards numb all human feelings; thought turns inward. During the long winter, people do their best to forget. Distance leeches all color from the valleys; it’s here the atmosphere changes. Spruces and pines cover both slopes and sorrows. A spiderweb of paths (leading nowhere) spreads throughout the forest. Everything's condemned to be cut down and carted away. The trees are taller and darker here; their melancholy is stronger than life. The fact that the valley has no visible borders makes escape impossible.
Sometimes, when you're caught between earth and sky, in the middle stages of being abducted by an alien saucer-ship, ropes of light looped under your arms and the backs of your knees, hoisting you skyward, there's a special sense of hope and wonderfulness; the feeling that, despite the unannounced stealing of you, these saucer-ship people, they might just be alright; a hope that this abduction just might land you a galaxy away, on some distant planet where warmongering and consumerism and bureaucratic paperwork and all the dirt and shame blah-ness of this world are nonexistent. Time slows down, folds into your pocket and, indeed, it's true, you've been removed from the earth by such people.
I let it be known to my friends, and even strangers as I was wandering around the country that what was interesting me was making English less understandable. Because when it’s understandable, well, people control one another, and poetry disappears – and as I was talking with my friend Norman O. Brown, and he said, ‘Syntax,’ which is what makes things understandable, ‘is the army, is the arrangement of the army.’ So what we’re doing when we make language un-understandable is we’re demilitarizing it, so that we can do our living.
During this phase of the investigation Cantarel and his assistants closely surrounded the animated corpse, watching his every movement in order to assist him from time to time when necessary. Indeed the exact reproduction of some muscular effort made in life to raise some heavy object – now absent – entailed a loss of balance which would have caused a fall, but for their prompt intervention. Furthermore, whenever the legs, with only flat ground before them, began to ascend or descend some imaginatry staircase, it was essential to prevent the body falling either forwards or backwards, as the case might be. A quick hand had to be held ready to replace some non-existent wall against which the subject might be about to lean his shoulder, and he would have tended to sit down on thin air from time to time if their arms had not received him.
I had been waiting for some time. A tidy oblong coffee table presented the latest magazines. Twin lamps in opposing corners threw uneven light. It was slightly too hot. Institutional blue carpeting, dense and coarse. Unmemorable wallpaper. A throb in my top right second molar. Houseplants, three of them, at intervals, barely wilted. I couldn't tell you what kind. The standard tiled ceiling seemed slightly lower than is conventional. Under my forearm, the green vinyl covering of the chair, slightly sticky. Besides my seat, two others, just like it, and a long bench of similar design. Twin lamps lit unmemorable wallpaper from opposing corners, but I could hear a dull fluorescent hum, from somewhere. My seat faced the receptionist's window. Each of the four walls was exactly the same length, though each appeared to be a slightly different shade of beige. I did not peruse the magazines or other materials. The receptionist seemed to have departed. On closer scrutiny, one of the chairs was marginally lower than the other two. On closer scrutiny, the wall to my right was slightly shorter than the others. This forced it to meet the wall containing the receptionist's window at an almost imperceptibly obtuse angle, which did not appear to disturb the regularity of the angles and lengths of the other walls. The space behind the receptionist's window was darkened. It was unclear when the receptionist might return. One of the houseplants stirred lightly, though I did not feel a draft. There was an insistent ache in my top right second molar. I did not peruse the magazines or touch the houseplants. I shifted from my chair to the empty bench seat, which placed the shorter wall at my back. On closer scrutiny, one leg of the oblong coffee table appeared to be slightly shorter than the other three. As the table surface appeared level, I could only guess at a slight unevenness in the floor or carpeting, though I could discern no such aberration. The twin lamps rested on identical twin side tables, a third, empty, also identical, sat between two of the chairs. It was markedly too hot. A doorway beside receptionist's window lead into a narrow hall, hidden from my current angle. I felt a twinge of pain in my left bottom canine, only briefly. Besides the empty receptionist's window and hall, there were no openings. On closer scrutiny, the oblong coffee table appeared to have two irregular legs, one shorter and the opposing leg slightly longer. From this I surmised a slight slope to the floor and coarse institutional carpet. The ceiling appeared to be considerably lower than is conventional. A twinge in both my first and second right upper molars. It was unclear to me how long the receptionist had been gone. It was unclear to me how long I had been waiting. The insistent hum of unseen fluorescent lighting. I am uncertain as to what kind of houseplants they were. On closer scrutiny, the weave of the carpet appeared to be considerably denser, though no less coarse, at the foot of the wall now facing me. The green vinyl covering each of the three chairs and the bench seat was smooth but for, at intervals, sets of three parallel seams running the length of the surface. On closer scrutiny, the green vinyl of the bench seat was a slightly different shade than that of the three chairs. I am uncertain as to how the dimensions of a room could contain one shorter wall and one obtuse angle without disturbing the regularity of the angles and lengths of the other three walls. My left upper second bicuspid seemed to be hurting, I don't know for how long. I shifted back to my original location, facing the empty receptionist's window, though this time in the shorter of the three chairs, encouraging a slight slouch. Institutional gray-blue carpeting, coarse and dense. The latest unread magazines. Of the three houseplants, what kind I have no idea, two had leaves, one had what I would call tendrils. Both my top and bottom right second molars seemed to be throbbing. The hall next to the receptionist's window was about as long as the waiting room and lit only from the twin identical lamps in opposing corners. Meaning it received only indirect light. It did not appear to have any doors opening from it. The air was still and stuffy. On closer scrutiny, the houseplant with tendrils was what I would call totally wilted. On closer inspection, one of the two houseplants with leaves was actually artificial. No idea what kind it was designed to be. On closer scrutiny, the ceiling was not only markedly lower than is conventional, but sloped almost imperceptibly down towards my side of the room. The standard tiles of its surface were entirely uniform and unbroken in any way. I would imagine that the fire marshal would have something to say about the lack of sprinklers. It was entirely unclear whether the receptionist was ever coming back. There was a chip in the wood of the left edge of the coffee table, leading to a fine crack, hidden until just now by the latest magazines. My left lower lateral incisor was developing an ache. It was entirely unclear to me at this point whether the receptionist had ever been there at all. Unmemorable wallpaper, in slightly different shades of beige. The houseplant with leaves which did not appear artificial may have stirred, though I felt no breeze in the air, which was uncomfortably warm and rather humid. I did not peruse the reading materials or search beneath the seats. I did not attempt to tap on the darkened receptionist's window, which was what I would call obviously uninhabited. On closer scrutiny, the side table without a lamp, just to my right now, appeared to be of a totally different wood grain than the other two. I have no idea what kind of wood. The damp, sticky gray-green vinyl under my left forearm. Probably they are all artificial anyway, and not any kind of wood. It is unclear to me why there would be a hallway without any doors or other openings. The sweltering air. My first and second top left bicuspids, throbbing in sympathy with the hum of unseen fluorescent lighting. My right first upper molar. On closer scrutiny, the hallway was definitely totally useless. The waxy leaves of the artificial houseplant. My left lower canine. On closer scrutiny, the weave of the gray carpeting beneath the bench seat was considerably softer, though no denser or less dense than the rest of its surface. My bottom right first bicuspid. I did not attempt to put the shorter of the three chairs through the receptionist's window. The irregular tear in the vinyl on the underside of the bench seat. In no way did moving the closer lamp from its side table into the mouth of the hallway, providing direct light, serve to illuminate any features I had not previously noted. Which is to say that it illuminated no features at all. My left top central incisor. There was absolutely nothing to be seen in the dark of the receptionist's window. It was unclear to me how the receptionist's window might be operated. The unconventional closeness of the slanting ceiling, whose uniform tiles would not budge in any way when pushed from below with both hands. When carelessly knocked over, the lamp illuminating the hall rolled straight to the back of the room, beneath the shorter of the three chairs, and promptly went out. It is entirely unclear to me how I came to be in this waiting area. With only one lamp, the lighting is what I would call totally inadequate. The uneven density of the institutional gray carpeting. My first, second, and third right upper molars. I do not peruse the reading materials because there aren't any. Knocking on the receptionist's window produces a dull thud and no changes in the darkness behind it. My left upper lateral incisor. There is nothing underneath any of the seating, side tables, or cracked oblong coffee table. Besides the broken lamp. There is nothing inside the tear in the gray-blue vinyl covering of the bench seat. Besides its metal framework. On closer scrutiny, I'm not sure there were ever any reading materials. Latest or otherwise. Both of my lower canines. The nearly unbreathable heat and humidity of the air. All furniture seems to be sagging towards the corner to the left of the blue vinyl seats. The lowest corner. The whine of unseen fluorescent lighting. I move the second lamp to the floor before it can fall. My upper and lower second bicuspids, and the upper first and second molars. They're throbbing horribly. It is entirely unclear to me as to why the gray-green institutional carpeting should vary so wildly in both coarseness and density across the entire floor of the area. My left lower first molar. The damp, soft, shaggy carpet in the sunken corner. When I lift up the shorter of the three blue vinyl chairs, it is slippery with sweat and humidity. Both my lateral and central left lower incisors. The shriek of unseen fluorescent lighting in near-choking air. When I attempt to put the chair through the receptionist's window it bounces off with such force that it pulls me over backwards with it. The slippery damp of the tilting gray-green institutional carpet. My inability to breath in this place. When the chair strikes the lamp, the bulb goes out with a pop. The unbearable noise of unseen fluorescent lighting. When the second lamp is extinguished, the dark of the waiting area is total.
I was born into the forest with a memory of searching. My palms hung white, marked by cold rain sluicing through the canopy.
A house, abandoned, rose from the green floor. Plants grew into it in a reclamation effort. I climbed the collapsed porch and entered.
What I know:
The homes are all abandoned.A two story brick house with a collapsed chimney. Found objects: a violin, a Boston Bicentennial commemorative silver plate, tv trays, three yellow ribbons in a glass box, a shotgun barrel clogged with soil, sheet metal, and a white circle where a clock hung.
Forest surrounds them.
They exist in varying stages of decay.
Evidence of habitation, then evacuation, litters them.
The common, puncturing memory of a gate: metal scraping on metal, the bottom right corner digging into dirt, a sharp creak. They are thinly connected, as if by long, loose strands of thread.
The last memory is of it unceasingly open, soundless.
Place a black stone, irregular but smooth, into a wide, clear wall. Some transformation occurs. The wall is made soft and permeable, like an inch thick layer of wet clay.
Movement can then take place.
I close my eyes and pass through. When I open them the stone has fallen to the floor, the wall is solid, and I am in a new home.
A blue two-story house. The yard is seeded with shingles. Found objects: a drawer of rings, a bell jar of fused together toffees, three rolls of yellowed toilet paper stacked under the sink, a tooth, a can of red spray paint, seven full black garbage bags burst by expanding wet leaves, two bibles, and a box of grey matches.
The ceiling of leaves, the black-blue spots of sky, the stars. Wind stirs the canopy. I recognize common shapes: branches, leaves, moss. Then that recognition exits, breaks off. The canopy is a net, a screen, a ceiling caved in.
This home resembles the others, but new in all available ways. I am not sure how I arrived or departed. Nothing is abandoned; all things here have people to claim them.
The body is a white silhouette on the ground. I stare at it for hours before realizing what it is.
It is small and light, almost hollow. I remember the act of carrying and the travel of crunching leaves.
This house is filled with the presence of another. I think to call out and welcome him, but halt at the memory of chasing.
I find the man, a dark shape, leaning over a sputtering faucet, washing something off his hands. My footsteps make no sound.
Somewhere in the woods I find the open gate. I place her body inside, laid out on the gravel path between rectangles of lawn.
I close the gate behind me. The sound connects and forms with scraping metal. All things here have people to claim them.
There are others; I am sure. I have found their notes, their footsteps in dust, their hair and flakes of skin. I have found their new, recent traces of decay.
I am certain I am not going around in circles.
I am certain that I will someday turn a corner or pass through a wall and someone will be there to greet me.
He set out the knife, the room felt aligned, and the passing light outside cast into hollow relief the contents of the room, the made bed, water in glass, he picked up the glass and watched the water lose its last silver beam, the light was gone again, he held the glass up to his eyes and knew that it held memory, like his.
The bottom edge of the large glass window, the entire southern wall, a nearly perfect seal and line, broken with bushes of dust, he caught himself, nebulae, all the stars were hidden behind the rest of the city and what it poured out, and he felt that this was true for all that was behind him.
The knife displayed a soft melting cut of light, low watts, held on the metal, in the kitchen. Other contents of all other drawers put up.
Reported squalor, this too was a lie. He cleaned up, soon after he walked in, placing every object in a place that seemed just moved from where it had been before. The cast of light from the surrounding buildings set his hands in every known yellow, he looked down at the letter, it became all white.
He eventually stilled.
Near the southern wall and angled open into the rest of the interior, holding half the kitchen at this distance, the mirror. He straightened his chest in parallel, looked first at himself, quickly to the rest of the thing, the surface, as the light passed again and filled the room. His face removed from the mirror momentarily. He looked down, his right hand trembling. He first felt movement, then saw age. His skin presented a vibrating surface just above another. This, too, was sick. The elongated first stroke of the K, the grain of the marble that he then noticed, just then.
What happened to the first time.
What was just celebrated, what you helped me celebrate so well darling, is now, he couldn’t find the pen, he went to the original drawer. The knife was just as clean. He felt the room in its original state. A registered blank pause, putting the tip of the pen on top of, into the final period. Pushing, then more pressure. His shoes, in the mirror.
He dropped the pen and saw himself lift his right hand as a fist and pull it back, then what, fuzz. He stopped. His breathing now sounding, in, out, in, what had he seen. More breathing. Inspecting the surface of the mirror, the glass. The clean glass, what was that, or a passing light. Through the southern wall, a small rise, the slowly circling machine. Nearing its far spot along the constrained orbit. Clockwise, his eyes reaching a sharp spot, above or in his forehead. There, a speck. None. He blinked. The weight moved into the outer walls of his throat, filled with liquid. The fuzz.
Couldn’t wait, the orbiting machine, the recently dead clock. The batteries in the drawer under the knife. Separated by a mechanically treated and smoothed palate of granite. He turned away from the mirror but didn’t walk. The blood congealing, dry at the southernmost edge. Closest to the wall of window. He faced the mirror.
The room, the sharp edge of the blade just a fresh birthed dimension, the edge of the paper belonging there, in its place, the same. The paradox. On paper, where he first saw it named a boon. A cast of gods, holding outside the southernmost window, to live in other worlds. He knew the succession of events would fail early, that is when the answer became a possibility, when he died. He didn’t write that on the paper, in the letter. His wife an invitation to keep being eaten. He felt its presence everywhere, in every surface. He felt it in his hair, his nicked neck. His eyes, letting them blur out and become concurrent with his peripheral vision, acuity faded, prayer no longer a joke, prayer quickly still a joke, asking himself out loud for luck enough to keep that vision. All dumb.
The fuzz in the image. This mirror. Light washed in.
He breathed in through his mouth. He had vibrated, blurred. What he’d seen. Doubted what the depth of the anomaly was. Knew again depth was felled with the conception. Immediately the pain, irony expanded. Again, saying out loud, here you doubt the depth of this, cursing omitted. He relied on her.
This was the mirror. He felt their cool surface dampen the bottom of his palms. Not perfectly clean, then, other than the blood remaindered in the kitchen, somewhere, the black dot, the collections, sparse though, of dust. Prolong and clean. Prolong and clean. Shaking the loop out, not letting himself repeat, himself. He sighed. He felt long. His eyes, straight and then vaguely tugged in his peripheral sight. He shook the mirror. It displayed regularly. Or what he knew to be regular.
Inclined, falling face forward, the great glass plain rushing toward him, endless murk. The mirror did shake, maybe from the passing machine in its regular loop, or from another tenet, from a high, particular glance of wind, up this high, high enough for a fall to become contemplative, where is terror anymore, which is why the knife, it could have been wind. A neighbor. Someone’s bath. The scores of buried pipes, huge fiber optic cables carrying light, someone’s something could’ve burst. The glass held itself right and perfectly smooth, his hair was graying above the right temple, which had come too with the onset of the answer and what, this, what it lead to, he wrote doom. Somewhere. On his knees now, had been, he also forgot how long, knees becoming basins of painful information, blood packed around white plates. The imagined amputation. He saw his face.
A little difficulty walking back to the kitchen counter, not looking back, now, inevitably he felt, he’d sense more than the mirror moving, seemingly shaking or fuzzing his image on its own, but now he heard it shake violently enough to capture, the whole mirror and its wooden frame, thrown forward, glass rushing toward the ground, shattered. None of this, of course, no, the handle of the knife pointing slightly to the bottom right corner of the paper, the signature. Omitted cursive, spelled it all out plainly.
I am sorry.
This, too, as his neck felt flaky, recourse. The city appeared great, spiking upward in dark shoots, a solid glance of yellow ember, quiet nights, passing light, all became flush, he felt for a moment the complete lack of surfaces, instead one unified grain, peculiar, the nighted city a high silent host.
The southern window in a gel, he struggled against this, this time. Finally. The knife appeared familiar and old. The paper caught one of the tears, the water moved out on all sides in small perimeter, branched, that we could never predict, that this, he cried, was not a problem anymore.
His arm blurring, moved to his head and whole body, the knife clattered, his body losing its relief against the kitchen, the light behind him, edges lost. He felt. The image. Seeing such a blur. Knew, a second before, about the light. All was white. He felt it go, staying open, not blinking, the mirror displayed perfectly. What had he seen. At the top edge of sight, he breathed.
Pursued. Monitored.
The death, he hadn’t written it down, the answer, the mirror and maybe the orbiting placeholder machine outside. Watching him. The shatterproof window. Now, briefly entertaining that he had written it down, that it could, would, be found, without disturbing her. Hurting her. Felt a projection of this, a model scene, sitting down for the first time with a tablet and endlessly repeating the command to make himself represent it, what it stood for, stood as, its own monolith now and no one could understand, no one else alive could be in the same state, know the same, so much prior work. The very old myth. Pandora’s Box.
An idea alive.
Smash the mirror, let it present itself as all sorts of opportunity, varied shards, the clean tool, the letter. He felt right. He grew. Top of the mirror and pulled. It boomed, face down, containing most of the break. The cardboard brown back. Bits were smaller than he’d guess. Largest piece of glass in the room, other than the southern, knife as the letter fluttered off the table behind him. He tipped, and pulled the sharp end toward him, splitting the backing neatly, surgery. Thinner than he’d expect, and paper. Nothing immediate. The new slit, barely lit, flushed out just then, still in the light a weird pull to cut his throat then, just then, nothing more in the immediate space, dark gray and matte rear of the mirror. All flat. Slit puckering out, another clean line. Only now could he draw straight. Old tools.
Tore the paper off, ripping in sections, stubborn faults that kept leading to smaller sections still stapled to the back of the frame. Near the corner, tip of his right shoe, about the same color as that black, a small dot. Perfect circle. It’s it. Smaller than a button on a shirt. He slowly lowered the tip of the knife onto it, a clink, another metal. Raised. Scanned, presumably, or just signaling whether it worked or not. But why the distortion.
He raised, glass swept out in an arc, scattering patches with each swipe, the grains of glass through his shoe, heightened now he felt. Identification, live readers. Couldn’t walk back out of the building, the city, all the rest.
The knife, now a farce. What they’d do to take him alive. Doing.
Flat, no return, clicked again and the ink ran smooth, crossed out goodbye he thought as he flipped the paper, put the ball to the top left corner. Begin at the glass. Sick, rolling, he bent over more severely to squelch it, whatever this was. Stopped smelling the disinfected marble, drying his mouth even further. Slowly. The mirror, it’s fragments, in repose. Rest.
Had it slowed down or gone away, no. Past its furthest point, curving towards. All dark. Swallowed. How do you ever pose the question anymore. Presenting it visually, in the first meeting. That was the chief difficulty, presenting it.
He drew out, a straight line right, west. Orientation. The line became braced by another, short, down, sharp, out, stairs. Stairs leading upper left to bottom right. Descending. Through time, not only the local pattern of time, left to right. The city, again, united as the room went white, paper blank. He laughed. Laughing, bright.
The light was gone.
Two sticks. The words mushed, just underneath, murky. Cubed. It all fit within the glass.
Move.
Nothing is more infectious than the passion for collapse.
cat loves mouse; mouse hates cat; mouse hits cat with brick; cat mistakes brick for love; and so on, day after day. The backgrounds of the strip were in constant inexplicable flux: a desiccated specimen of Arizona flora morphs in the next panel into a crescent moon, then into a snowcapped butte, while the characters chatted obliviously on, caught up in their own obsessive round.
We would climb up the tree. There was a tree here instead of this house. I made this house out of the tree if you must know. I would play a trumpet, the very trumpet that you see now in my hands, that is. One day I played, and a little parrot flew out of the trumpet. I said, Catch, and my sister opened her hands, which were bigger than mine, and caught the parrot.
We taught the parrot some words. We taught it the word monkey and the word squirrel, and other words to name the animals we knew were living in the trees and that more likely the parrot would have encountered in its life.
The parrot: the only word it would say was "lingualunga," which the parrot overheard our mother say to us in her language, and which meant "longtongue."
According to our mother, we were talking all the time and even in our sleep. The first day the parrot—if my sister would open the hand—would try to fly out. So what we did first was we took off feathers, we took feathers off the parrot's wings. Seeing that even with only few feathers left the parrot would keep trying to fly out of her hand, my sister kept the hand closed with the parrot in it as long as we thought was enough for the parrot to get used to its new life.
We would climb up the ghost. There used to be a ghost here instead of all this ice. I made the ice out of the ghost if you must know. I would play a card, the very card that you see now in my mouth, that is. One day I played, and a little bone flew out of the card. I said, Catch, and my sister opened her mouth, which was bigger than mine, and caught the bone.
We taught the bone some words. We taught it the word fenugreek and the word asafoetida and other words to name the spices we knew were living in the ghost and that most likely the bone would have encountered in its life.
The only word the bone would say was "cortometraggio," which the bone overheard our mother tell us in waves of regret and which meant "it will be over soon."
According to our mother, we were talking all the way and even in our stinking jackets. The first day, whenever my sister opened her mouth, the bone would try to stagger out. So what we did first was we took off the fleas, we took fleas off the bone's gray gown. Seeing that even with only a few fleas left the bone would keep trying to stagger out of her mouth, my sister kept the mouth closed with the bone in it as long as we thought was enough for the bone to get used to its new life.
Khrushchev unbuttoned his own pants and took out his long, uneven penis with its bumpy head, its shiny skin tattooed with a pentacle. The count spat in his palm, lubricated Stalin’s anus with his saliva, and, falling upon him from behind, started to thrust his penis softly into the leader.
By focusing on inanimate objects and empty spaces, the photography creates a void in the middle of the image, pulling, as in the effect of décadrage, the gaze towards the edges of the frame, where chaos might be lurking. The systematic decentering of the human figure enhances the barrenness of the sets, and the horror filters in as if to fill the emptiness.
Reality hovers. I don’t mean that reality is absent, rather, there can be a presence of nothing. I can walk down a dark industrial street at night while Drake plays on my headphones and not realize I’ve already walked the four blocks to where I need to turn. Sit on the front porch and chain-smoke until you’re so chilled by a dry air that you’re violently shaking.
The people all around you, signifiers of relationships, parts of a whole, how can you exist unfragmented in the 21st century, why would you even want to. Compartmentalize your life so it can start to make sense. But it doesn’t. Does it matter how many people you and your significant other take home to get naked with? In the morning everyone else is gone. Nobody came so there was no emotional connection. Is come a true sign of passion?
The moon eclipsed. A tarot reading that insists your hermitage is necessary, a required contingency of your life’s trajectory. The cards don’t lie, they always say. Sitting on the green cloth while you all sit on the bed. You feel comfortable and warm. Everything makes sense.
Write a note in your diary in jest and find out a month later that you’ve accurately written your future. Understand that this is a hard talent to hold, that it’s been happening for over a year and you still haven’t mastered it. Stare into space, come into a paper tissue, never fall asleep before three am. Sleep until noon. Always keep Notepad open on your desktop because otherwise you forget everything.
Balance isolation with couplehood with the society life. Find yourself, remember that.
I was sangfroid and so I sang Freud and dragged out joints of cliché—say we, may we accept sherry? Manegg was born innately. Let me put an end to son envy and colonialism with natalism—that was my intention, ambition. Nevertheless, I stand up to urinate and wave hello in my halo of amniotic trance. Ugly egg, chicken-sized, and natally late. At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent.
Is it not drama? Whether manegg is a count or non-count noun is not parent to me, which is to say, I am in trance, transparent, phonically speaking. Let me put an end to grammar of obedience and colonialism with fetal ontology—that was my intention, eggbition. Event very parent. Correct me if you wish. I am kind of late sing-along. My tongue is forever attached to nipples. Incubate me, terminate me. Frammar, grammar’s fetality is a production against trauma.
There was a boy whose name was Adolf and he loved to douse bodies with gasoline. There was a girl whose name was Otis and she lived inside a horse. “Addie,” the boy’s friends used to call him when they sniffed scotchguard in garages all across the suburbs. Otis was always called Otis but the horse was called Convulsions.
One day Otis and Adolf decided to become Artists in the Big City.
Otis and Adolf came from different kinds of families and their families responded in different ways to these new plans. Adolf’s father looking silly in his hat and medals from the war. He looked particularly silly in the footage from the war, dousing small bodies with gasoline. Despite all of this silliness he loved art and was overjoyed when his son told him the big news.
“But what kind of art are you going to make?” the father asked the son.
“The kind of art that inflicts me with bodily damage,” answered Adolf.
Otis’s family was more responsible and more concerned about their daughter’s wellbeing.
“Who is going to feed the horse,” asked her mother.
“I’m going to let it starve for art,” said Otis.
“How will you clean it,” asked her father.
“I will use the riot hose of the big city,” said Otis.
“How will you keep its blood from being poisoned,” asked her little brother while sucking on his worn-out thumb.
“I will let the city pollute every capillary of its body,” answered Otis.
And with that she left the suburbs with Adolf and moved into the big city, which was swarming, yes, swarming with people and toys and guns and insects and cars.
Everybody shimmered with sweat.
“How do we get started,” asked Adolf. “I can’t wait to become an Artist.”
“We have to figure out what to do for our art,” said Otis. “It can’t involve my horse because she has already been dying for days.”
“That’s too bad because I love the sound horses make when they are hit by bullets. Should we kill girls?” asked Adolf anxiously.
“Killing girls is so typical,” answered Otis. “It’s like a wallpaper out there of dead girls. How about giving birth to a child instead,” she suggested and sucked on a straw that led into a bottle of orange soda.
It was ironic that the child they conceived of in the sweaty dark, fiddling with each other’s genitals and slobbering on each other’s shoulders and lips, looked a bit like a dead girls and a bit like a horse.
“What do we do now?” asked Adolf.
“We have to exhibit her,” said Otis, who had already begun working on a silver cage.
And exhibit her they did – with and without the hosed-off horse, inside and outside the silver cage which Otis had made by hand from items filched from jewelry stores, inside and outside galleries with white walls and walls hammered into pieces and walls built on the bones of birds, and walls behind which Adolf imagined other children hidden, eating horse meat and learning how to count based on the footsteps from the upstairs apartment.
This list may have given you the idea that Otis and Adolf had succeeded in becoming artists in the big city, but that was not the case. They encountered much resistance – to the motif of the child with a beak, to the use of stolen items, to the use of silver, to the imperfect surface of the horse body, to the artists’ obvious desire to fornicate with each other, to the sense that they in their occult fornication had not only engendered an obnoxious child who swore at the spectators, but also that they in their occult fornication had duped the Art World, had fooled the spectator, had somehow made a mockery of not just Art but human relations (whether man-woman or man-man or woman-woman).
However, they did earn the love of one very rich woman with an exotic, possibly foreign, last name. She was the person who funded their exhibitions, and as their child grew older, she funding the child’s education. She was a woman of great wealth and great intellectual powers. Together they would have conversations about the nature of art in her hottub, which unfortunately leaked.
This leak into the downstairs apartment proved to be emblematic of the kind of disrespect Otis’s and Adolf’s love affair had proven to the Art World. Petitions were signed and passed around quietly. Many people harbored ill will, though few actually spoke up against Adolf and Otis because to do so would be to bring attention to their immoral projects. So silently, people grew angrier and angrier, while the water pooled and pooled in the downstairs apartment. People began to wonder, isn’t it time, isn’t it time we finally spoke out against these occult immoralists? No, it was not time yet, they could not bring attention to such an immoral pair of fornicators.
So it was with great relief to everyone when one day the child escaped from her cage leaving no note and no forwarding address, and Adolf and Otis decided to go back home to figure out what they were now going to do. They were no longer children, and they had poured years into their child project.
“It’s a good thing they’re gone,” people from the art world would say. “We no longer have to be pissed off about their occult fornication.”
“What are we going to do now?” asked Adolf.
“I don’t know. I can’t carry this horse around any longer,” said Otis.
“And our families have long since abandoned this suburban hell-hole,” said Adolf.
This list may have given you the idea that Otis and Adolf had succeeded in becoming artists in the big city, but that was not the case. They encountered much resistance – to the motif of the child with a beak, to the use of stolen items, to the use of silver, to the imperfect surface of the horse body, to the artists’ obvious desire to fornicate with each other, to the sense that they in their occult fornication had not only engendered an obnoxious child who swore at the spectators, but also that they in their occult fornication had duped the Art World, had fooled the spectator, had somehow made a mockery of not just Art but human relations (whether man-woman or man-man or woman-woman).
However, they did earn the love of one very rich woman with an exotic, possibly foreign, last name. She was the person who funded their exhibitions, and as their child grew older, she funding the child’s education. She was a woman of great wealth and great intellectual powers. Together they would have conversations about the nature of art in her hottub, which unfortunately leaked.
This leak into the downstairs apartment proved to be emblematic of the kind of disrespect Otis’s and Adolf’s love affair had proven to the Art World. Petitions were signed and passed around quietly. Many people harbored ill will, though few actually spoke up against Adolf and Otis because to do so would be to bring attention to their immoral projects. So silently, people grew angrier and angrier, while the water pooled and pooled in the downstairs apartment. People began to wonder, isn’t it time, isn’t it time we finally spoke out against these occult immoralists? No, it was not time yet, they could not bring attention to such an immoral pair of fornicators.
So it was with great relief to everyone when one day the child escaped from her cage leaving no note and no forwarding address, and Adolf and Otis decided to go back home to figure out what they were now going to do. They were no longer children, and they had poured years into their child project.
“It’s a good thing they’re gone,” people from the art world would say. “We no longer have to be pissed off about their occult fornication.”
“What are we going to do now?” asked Adolf.
“I don’t know. I can’t carry this horse around any longer,” said Otis.
“And our families have long since abandoned this suburban hell-hole,” said Adolf.
They sat on the lawn where they used to play as children, when in the shimmering, humid sunlight they saw, coming across the lawns and lawns, a very quick figure. It was, they realized, their child, who had come home with them. They looked out across the lawns and lawns and every house and every lawn and every pair of eyes glaring at them from behind curtains shimmered like gilded toys from a burnt down cathedral. They had made the world into art. Or rather, their child, the horrible child, had transformed their lives.
When poets dismiss “surrealism,” they’re not really talking about “Surrealism.”
They are talking about a discomfort with Art.
Other symptoms of this discomfort are saying that something is excessive, privileged, counterfeit, unoriginal, childish or irresponsible.
An anxiety about art that doesn’t “move us forward.”
This is the same anxiety that causes poets to talk about being the true inheritors of a certain “line” of poetry.
It’s the fear of fakers.
Ie artists.
It is fear of outsiders.
Poetry is lost in translation.
The inside is lost in translation.
These authorities of good taste think the true insiders will continue their bloodline.
I think: Art is not passed through lineage, but through influence.
Which comes from the outside.
Which is fake.
Ie one is “under the influence.”
I’m an immigrant and I’m constantly trying to translate.
But I translate things from the outside.
Like clothing.
Like cloning.
Which is to say, I'm neither inside nor outside but here.
Which is to say that there is no outside or inside, just here. An iteration.
When people dismiss certain poetics as “fashions” or “mannerisms,” they’re again anxious about Art.
Anxious about poets falling “under the influence” of “fashion.”
I’m more interested in Alexander McQueen than Ron Silliman.
When people are dismissing poems are too “poetic,” they’re participating in a long tradition of anti-kitsch rhetoric.
As Daniel Tiffany has shown, things are not dismissed as kitsch because they are lacking in beauty, it’s because they exhibit “excessive beauty.”
A Ballet: “The Red Detachment of Women.”
A Ballet: “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” (about Mao’s sparrows)
I’m more interested in excessive beauty than in “rigorous” poetry.
Any time someone talks about “rigor” and art, they’re trying to temper the excessive beauty of art.
They will inevitably claim they are doing it for health of literature.
For the future of literature.
Art has no future. It is sick. It is wasting away.
When I’m writing about shoplifting, I’m writing about the divine.
When I write novels about sugar and movies, I’m writing about war.
I don’t have the proper distance toward art.
I don’t believe in minimalism.
I’m prone to outburst and invasions.
I live in an exocity and I can taste the poisons.
I pick playgrounds for my children based on the contamination levels.
I pick my children up and stare at them as if they were snakes.
My children are snakes.
At least in the paintings of the pre-raphealites.
When I wrote novels about girls drowning in creeks, I’m writing about beauty.
When I write about fascism I’m writing about art.
Cover them in tarpaulin!
When I write about surrealism I inevitably focus on the automata.
Look at those mannequins!
But don’t look for too long or you’ll start a panic dance.
In order to dance the panic dance you will need a few things, such as lambs and hammers.
You’ll need a tight space.
A maelstroem year.
A maelstroem sore.
You will need fat.
When I open up the ampules to the lustgarden of suffering, I’m learning how to dance.
How to do my death drop.
I perform the death drop at certain pro-life rallies.
They want to crown me king of killed fetuses.
They want to crown me in a crown of cut-outs.
They want to drive me in a wheelbarrow to the gates of the clinic.
They don’t understand: I am walking toward the palace of victim.
They line the road with the roadkills and the video machines.
I dance the panic dance with hammers and lamb.
I do the death drop in a riot.
Hello to all my friends in Queens!
My costumes are eating me alive.
Today I’m watching black teenagers perform death drops.
I’m watching Artists perform riots with their makeup on.
I’m writing a novel about my daughter Sinead.
Today at the breakfast table, Sinead says to me: “You look so old, pappa, you look like you’re about to die.”
I have scars on my head and my shoulders.
I write novels about my skin, which is a failure.
Once I wrote one performance piece after I had been in a car crash.
On the TV I watched: one black widow and one white widow.
My nurse had black nail polish.
I wrote a performance piece called “The Widow Party.”
I wrote a breathing piece after watching a cartoon set in the desert.
I wrote a pastoral poem because my mask itched.
It was made of lamb meat.
My mask.
It was infected.
Maggots crawling all over.
I piled the dead bodies up on the ground because I felt media move through my shitty body.
I translated a poem about global capitalism because I was tired of cutting myself.
There was a butterfly humming in the wound, sucking the nectar out of the sweet sweet muck.
I wrote a performance piece about breaking into an old movie set with a hammer.
It was a fantasy about the body.
I wrote a wound piece about empires.
I wrote a performance piece about being alive.
Sometimes when I travel I rewrite old stories, such as the The Burial of George W. Bush, which I wrote while travelling in a skin-colored outfit (very vulgar).
I write nation pieces in black face.
I sign a blank check for The USA.
I don’t use my real name.
I sign it “The Immigrant” or “The Idiot.”
Or sometimes I sign it “John Ashbery.”
I write poems and sign them “John Ashbery” and send them into the New Yorker.
They always publish them.
I pile up the poems on the ground when I write about media.
I’m Catholic.
Sometimes when I write novels, I dream about setting fire to a radio that is telling me about masks and violence.
I write hole pieces because I’m angry.
I write hole pieces because I’m in love.
I write pastoral pieces because I can hear the pigs being slaughtered.
The pig meat is banging on the walls.
I love pig meat.
Pig meat is what I crave.
But the masks are mostly made of lamb meat.
Some of my poems are written on lamb meat.
The smell.
Like gasoline.
Sometimes I make screwy dolls.
You put them in the oven.
Voila!
American love dolls and they love to eat.
Hello to all my friends in Queens!
You are all as counterfeit as Art!
And I am too!
I’m watching black teenagers perform death drops.
I’m watching artists perform transcendence with hammers and nails.
When I write about cicadas I am thinking about war.
When I write about meat I am hammering in the nails.
When I write about gasoline I’m writing about the body.
When I write counterfeits I’m writing about art.
But today when I was watching the black teenagers die I was watching the news.
It was about the body.
It was varnished.
It was an historical artifact.
It was the 1980s.
The ha ha albino sky is rotting like meat in the poem’s throat. Sink yr fingers
in2 the creamo dreamo seal meat. Ensorcel yrself 4-evah in loaves of hottie
blubber.
The poem arranges suitable animals 4 yr maxi yum. Chew until u r reeling
around in yr blubs. Yr bones dripping out
I am rubbing one out on the horny techno body of the poem. In the middle
of the crime pageant. This is gross retail.
Everyone wants to engage in fancy looking. Yr eyes erupt into horns & u
gore the language matrix. To cheerily participate in wound culture. This is
what it means to write a poem.
The poem documents yr howling. When u became one of the “illegally
disappeared.” Yr fey squirting & other infantile abysmia.
A poem is a see-through membrane. A site of peculiar witchy media & yr
eventual collapse. Rabbity bodies mid-flinch. An anti-body on a ferral
mission. Hello. Hello. All u muffdivers & cockgobblers.
Poems are a trilling necrofantasia. Even above ground. Even in weak-eyed
heaven.
Please get yr eye out of my wanghole so I can proceed.
Please push yr eye so far into my wanghole that I fail. I need a collapse. Like
a swan rotating on a spit. I crawl into yr lap. The horizon is burning behind
us & draining into an iced-out pimp goblet. This goblet is the body of the
poem.
To get drained into. By some paradisical baller. This is to write. As u read these words, yr eyes tickle my meat nubbins. I begin to laugh &
swoon & my skeletal posture caves in. The spectacle of the poem is upon us.
Like a blessèd gob of spit.
We have never asked for this shameful exhibition. But we are thinking of
asking.
We will abandon every city we have ever built with our zoological
clairvoyance. Our goggling love of riots.
The poem is anti-history, the denarration of everything we have ever known.
The evacuation of the memesphere for some hottie tottie cock love & a little
cloud-blindness in parking lots.
It’s rarely enough.
I write down words because I am a speaking animal who will die, who is descended from dead animals who were made the same way.
Words are little holes you can poke your eyes through to touch the dead (if you are reading).
If you are writing they are the little holes you poke your hand through to touch people when they’re walking over your grave. (See Keats.)
I try to be nice to the living ones, the readers, even though as a dead animal I have to envy them somewhat.
Also I try to scare them a little, to keep things lively (so to speak).
Already a dead animal I try also to be a dumb one.
That’s not right though; I am talking all the time.
Dumb as in silly as in I THINK YOU WILL TALK BACK.
My dad the merchant mariner used to be so far at sea that to let him hear our voices we had to send him cassette tapes.
On the tapes I am always asking questions and on the tapes there is not yet a reply.
Do you like to go on the swing with me?
I am trying to understand the technology by using it wrong.
And if I am entertaining it is because of my mistakes.
I am sitting at a table with a big party of people who aren’t there.
But I do love them and want to feed them and to move with them in forms of vigorous dance.
Just because I can’t see them doesn’t mean I’m excused from my duties as host.
Just because I am a host doesn’t mean I won’t animal eat you!
Though I have tamed myself enough to carve out letters something there is (still) that does not love that wall.
Scraping letters onto a rock with a smaller rock my mother taught me to write my last name.
Because the rocks were in the Lake District (I’m serious) I have since been a Romantic.
What could be deader than that?
I don’t mind though and I hope you do not either.
If we set aside the minding we can spend more time jangling these bodies.
You know, jangle them while ye may.
If you line up all the pages in the world there is one hole that matches up through them.
It is where the Plank in Reason breaks.
I am trying to dance backwards into that hole; I think it won’t let me down there unless I am falling.
If I make it I will tell you what I see.
Hello and welcome! This week we'll begin with some premises, a few facts about myself:
My body is coated in a hard sharp hair. I have a hooked barb instead of a penis. My face is a sandpaper desert. No matter where, you will bleed to caress me.
I'm sorry. I don't know why I say the things I say when I'm on the tv.
Let me start over: This is a situation comedy. The situation is that I'm dying.
I used to think dialysis was dial a sis. I thought it was some kind of cross-dressing sex hotline, not a washing machine for blood.
I will break this machine and wash this whole office with blood. I will stain this carpet to have left some kind of mark somewhere, some big fading illegible blot.
I probably will not do any of the things I say when I am on tv.
We will open your mouth with a crowbar and turn it into our hiding cave. I'm the star of this program but I'm sick of you people seeing me. We will live in your molars, I mean it.
When I say 'we' I mean me and the other characters on this television program.
When I am on tv like now I say whatever I want to say because the tv will make it true. That man with the barbed-hook penis lives in the camera man's mouth, someone will say. I heard it on tv they will say.
I really will build a fortress of lost and broken off teeth. I promise I will, using carpenter's glue. Please send me your toothsome envelopes. I live at 273 North Street in Buffalo, New York. We will build it together if you want to come over.
I might tear out your kidneys and try to tape them into my side or glue them into my side with carpenter's glue.
Whenever I am on tv is when I talk this way. I promise this is true, like everything I say on tv.
I am the main character in this situation comedy. The other characters are a chair with eyes and a squid that looks more like a jellyfish. The other characters I drew with my own one hand.
I will draw characters on the outside of your kidneys if I get my hands on them.
I will mark up your kidneys so bad that your blood needs a good long cleaning.
We can watch old video tapes of Richard Pryor because after all this is a comedy.
I will draw the other characters in this tv show all over the front of your camera and pull out your teeth and kidneys and build things out of them and draw all over them.
I will pull the pieces out of you and leave myself all over them.
We can laugh at the comedy videos on the television screen.
My face is a beautiful scrap of sandpaper to make love to for a camera. This is a situation comedy. Next week: my spurting catheter malfunction that will ricochet, if you send yours, off my wall of donated teeth.
So again, your teeth. Send them please to me and may they fall out in droves for my using.
So until this time next week, good night and good luck!
We're speaking of your tongue, how it regenerates, that you cut it over and over from your mouth, how the blood pools in the cave of your lower lip until you spit it out and parcel us your tongue in strips. You use your front teeth then, them a sieve to strain the blood, to shift its path to ground. For the time after, you like to sit listening, sometimes humming, while we partake and take to speaking of your tongue.
For speaking of your tongue of course we use the other tongue of yours, your language, that called-tongue not eaten.
Tongue growth takes an hour and then, again, you can scalpel us mouth muscle, lay it on the skillet, season neatly with lichen and onion grass. I collect the water from the rock trickle and the twins set to scavenging what growths can be gathered. I collect also your spat blood in the blood pail for boiling to broth.
We're speaking around the constant fire that when you spoke you called 'eternal flame'. We lit it from the dregs of the last of the gasoline pumps. This was when there was still canned food and you would call the daylight 'school time' and cage the twins in the metal shopping cart. School time was when you pointed and spoke and with your fingers would help me right my mouth. Later, the twins came also to speech and I was called Teaching Assistant or TA or my last little TA and it was good that those days you kept my hair a length for tousling.
I'm telling you this because you ought to hear how I remember the time between the times your body fed me. I know that then was when you felt most mothersome and tenderhearted. You should know I know you past your meat.
But you see Mother, the twins, the twins who came late to speech and never into proper names, the twins have cast their votes together as always. And Mother, I fear you ought not to have passed on democracy as a part of our inheritance.
After the first growth or miracle, when your tongue returned (though we all saw it flat on the floor, severed from your seizure biting), you said, 'You see, your mother is indeed a saint!' And on the second accidental bite-through, you again were so happy to feel it re-grow. 'God knows,' you said, 'I've still some things to teach!'
But you must admit that your tongues have taught less and less since the food stock ran out. We agreed then that the places for tongues are mouths, and we agreed also that slicing was worth an attempt, and then it returned and you spoke of your 'prodigal tongue.' We cheered then, all of us, remember? The twins and I gave praise in hunger as you braised your tongue on the fire.
It was one tongue daily for each of us for some time after, until our growing required more cuts to sustain us. Now you only reserve a working tongue for the lecture hour. Do you not see your progression to silence? This change is only really a continuation.
We took the vote while you were sleeping. And as the twins are two and I am only one, well, who was I to vote at all? Your own vote, beside my held-tongue, could not have saved yours, so I felt no compunction to wake you, chose instead to let you sleep in peace.
But now is no longer time for words.
Now is time to open wide.
i'm going in for
a CAT Scan imean an audition
for an opera
will it finally
break into
Two paths
this suffering One is tiresome
every gentle piece
of marble in
the sun was
once beaten
into shape
this doesn't
work with people
take many deep
breaths maybe
breathing can help
Jesus didn't
need balance
he had nails
Today is full of harsh noise and everything else.
Any town can feel like heaven.
Fox Hollow and the Chateau are inexhaustibly
haunted. A scene from the valley that reminds you of being young.
Are you glad to see the season because it helps
when the dead come back? Maybe there was a
real life slaughter inside you? Pull my face
against your solar plexus, my Virginia, that place of power.
The past sucks. 36 hours listening to American Football,
then I woke up in the water near lower Manhattan and Michael
was the only one who would come to see me.
Dreams are real experiences. There was a scent
there I picked up that reminded me of someone else.
Out there, all that universe, and me stuck in this
pattern of seven repeating days. Let's spread out our thoughts
under all this sky. Men don't understand anything.
When I come back blonde I'm going platinum and staying that way
for a long time.
He holds his fingers up to the sky and they blend with the clouds. His lips go to say to her, to speak the words, to make the sound of I know that between us we have lost everything we had but today is a new day and different from yesterday and maybe with this kind of sun there will be something left but the words go to smoke along with his eyes and his nose and his teeth, all the haze exhaled. Going like this until the world is full of more confusion than it was and the people they look through a gauze like cotton stretched tight over the sky and her not knowing anything different other than how fog and smoke and clouds and words are all another way to be hollowed.
Sand is a collection of rocks. Sand is pebbles. Sand is sun. Sand is a reflection. Sand is what goes between words. He places a grain of sand between I and love and then the sand is gone and he cannot finish. He cannot repeat as he wants to you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you.
And he knows that glass is something that he looks through. He knows that glass is a shield. He knows that glass is what we make when we boil down sand to just its reflections. Like letting loose his shadows on the sidewalk and taking them around town. A tour. This is where I used to eat. This is where I used to live. This is where there was something called me and then I peeled that skin off and what was underneath was this glass. Was this sand. Was this man that sometimes I wake to in the morning and say What the fuck is it that you are doing here?
Glass is a jaded sharp edge. His fingers tilled sidewalk soil, the earth between the slabs, the sprouts that will weed there. The living he is trying to complete.
Will you still tell me your dreams he asks but to a woman with a dog, not the woman in the apartment above the street looking down on the street and not seeing him there.
Sleeping outside of her apartment, the sidewalk a blanket, he waits out winter. He waits. He shouts to her window I see you undressing and you are as beautiful as ever but she doesn’t wave or look in his direction. She sees a cardboard box and a distilled summer turning.
Go ahead, pretend he screams, his lungs filled with anger and unsaid conversations and the pictures of her waiting for him in bed, her opened up hand a wink, a code, a gesture. Flowers as they bloom for one last instant.
This, before the air was made wetted and sick, before the words stopped making sense, before he grew camouflaged with the rest of the world.
Come out he said and she washed her hair in his words. Cherry shampoo and fingers through skin, weaving white on a palette. Hot water and steam, a pirate ship boarding. She walked the plank, she fell to the water, she treaded one two and then the world swallowed her, the giant gulp of seaweed teeth, a scratch scrape of peach colored coral.
She did not scream his name.
When he sets me here, he sets me here not to look at me. When he sets me here, he sets me here to look into the sky and laugh. When he sets me here, he sets me here to forget what it means to have legs that can unsettle the ground. When he sets me here, he sets me here to become tree bark, remember the sensuousness of my fingers. I am set here to sit on top of this tree and scrape the moon with my teeth. This tree grew out of the place that he marked for me three generations ago. I was born here, he put me here. He takes me by the big toe every morning, dangles me upside down over the deep wood that whispers. The wood grew when I was born. He put me here in this wood, I live here with him. He buries relics in the back of my knees, the inside of my elbows, underneath my arms. He brushes my neck with the silver hair. He burrows his face between my legs and turns me into a river. He takes me by the big toe every morning and blesses my ankles. He knows my weakness. He exists here without a face. Long ago, he put his face in my hands and said, "Take it." I looked at his face and kissed it. He took my kiss and bottled it, forced it into his throat. He breathes my lips. When he sets me here, he sets me here to write him new songs from the whispers of sycamore. When he sets me here, he sets me here to sing him new songs over the cacophony of the wood. He whispers softer than the trees. He touches the air around me with his thought. He eats the marrow of trees, consumes generations. Before I was born, he had a face. When I was born I kissed his face, and he forgot his face. Before I was born, the wood did not exist. He lived in the hollow of a stump, he drank the fermented tears of the woman of the stump, he combed her hair drunk every morning. He took her by the hand every morning, taught her the words of the wood he envisioned. He put dirt on the face he had, he combed her hair with his rib. He took the bones from his feet and arranged them in words where he envisioned the wood would be. The woman of the stump cried and dissolved the bones. The woman of the stump covered her body with the leaves of the sycamore. He took the leaves of the sycamore and drank the chlorophyll. The woman of the stump was still greener. Before I was born, he entered her and combed her hair every morning. He marked the ground with his rib and generations later I was born. I was born and he didn’t look at me. I circled around my tree for a generation. I circled around my tree every morning. I circled around my tree and then I slept. I circled around my tree and he didn’t look at me. He combed the hair of the woman of the stump and they covered their bodies with the leaves of the sycamore. I was paler than the pale of the wood. She was colored green. When I became a woman, he looked at me. I spoke the words of the wood he envisioned, he forgot his rib and looked at me. He put his face in my hands and said, "Take it." I looked at his face and kissed it. I did not know what it meant to kiss him. I circled around my tree and didn’t know about kissing. I kissed his face and he forgot his rib, he forgot his face. He takes me by the big toe every morning and I do not look into his face. When he sets me here, he sets me here to not look at his face. I no longer circle around my tree, but I sit in my tree because he set me here. He ran his hands over my long legs and he set me atop this tree. The woman of the stump became greener and greener. She lost her hair, she covered herself in bark and leaves, she forgot how to unsettle the ground with her legs. The woman of the stump grew into the wood and whispers to him every morning. Hanging by my big toe, her whisper crawls into my ear, curls and rapes. He takes his rib every morning, shoves it down her throat. The woman of the stump shrinks into her tree every morning, cradling the vestigial rib in her belly. He never gave her child, he gave her his rib, he combed her hair. When he sets me here, he sets me here not to inseminate me. When he sets me here, he sets me here to become white chaste bark. When he sets me here, he sets me here only so he can look in my eyes. He takes my eyes and coats them in gold. He takes my shoulders and casts them in bronze. He paints my teeth with lapis, he shears the hair from my skin with the bark for teeth cleansing, he smoothes the wax for the teething of broken infants over my hairless body. When he sets me here, he puts me here to scrape the moon with my body. When he sets me here, he sets me here to bite into the sky. He makes me gleam in the mouth of sky. I am a fang above the wood.
He stands beneath me, beneath my weight. I am a fang pressing into his chest. He looks into me and his touch is tender. His touch of himself is unknown. His touch of himself is holy. I scrape the moon with my body and offer him forgotten water. I slip against the tree bark, carve it with my weight, wrap him with it. When he sets me here, he sets me here to look into me. His touch of himself is catholic. His touch of himself touches into me. We sit in this tree and feed each other darkness where the breath leaves. The breath leaves and spirals outwards into a darkness. His touch of himself is a vesper. His touch of himself is anointing. He touches himself with quick moistness, he is canonized. He is of quick moistness, he is of quick breath, he is of quick skin. His skin teaches me what it is to weep. His jaw teaches me what it is to be small. His ankles teach me what it is to dance in your feeling. Once, I circled around my tree and did not know what it is to kiss him. Once, he combed a woman’s hair and she did not know his touch of himself. He entered her and combed her hair every morning. His fingers knew what it was to spin. Her fingers knew what it was to spin. Once, he spun his fingers and the woman did not know the cradle inside him. His ankles dance in his feeling, his legs sweeten the air. His fingers spin and there is a darkness where the breath leaves. His fingers spin and a chrysalis blooms into the wood. Chrysalis spun from quick moisture. Quick moisture of amber and cream. Angel's eggs. Mortar and pestle. Chrysalis spun from amber and cream. Honey and angel's eggs. His fingers spin and enter a sainthood. His fingers spin and reach a state of being. He anoints me and there is a darkness where the breath leaves. We are holy. When he sets me here, he sets me here to wrap me in his warmth and glow inside. I am inside my cocoon. Chrysalis catholici.
He is in a solace of curls. He is in a forest of curls. He is in a sanctuary of curls.
He turns me into a river.
1. I AM IMAGINARY 2. I GIVE YOU A STIGMATA 3. MAKE A SOLILOQUY ON WHAT YOU THINK GREAT IS 4. I MAKE YOU BELIEVE 5. WHY BYARS 6. WE HAD EXACTLY THE SAME IDEA 7. THE IMAGINARY PERFORMANCES OF JAMES LEE BYARS 8. I GIVE YOU PERFECTLY NOTHING 9. I WRITE A 100 POEMS A YEAR 10. THE GIRL IS SO PURE SHE DOESN’T EVEN DRINK WATER 11. B?B 12. DON’T YOU LOVE MY NEW FRAME :: :: 13. ½BELIEF IS A LOT 14. I’M HIS IMMORTALITY 15. WHISPER PERFECT TO THE GOLDEN PEAK OF THE KUNSTHALLE 16. SEE IT IS THE GIFT 17. TOODOOLOO 18. BEAUTY IS MY MOTIVE 19. HYPOTHESIS DOESN’T EXIST 20. HIS STYLE IS A GLASS OF WATER 21. I MADE UP THE CONSCIENCE OF THE EXHIBITION 22. THE PERFECT AUDIENCE IS TO TURN AROUND 23. HE KNOWS HOW TO TAKE COMPLIMENTS THANK YOU 24. MAMA WAS HIS DEATHWORD 25. SEE HOW HE SHOWS HIS NAME 26. TELL MY STYLE 27. THE EXHIBITION OF MR B. THINKING 28. I FREE YOU 29. THE SHOCK OF WRITING A LETTER 30. IT’S TOO BEAUTIFUL 31. THOUGHT IS PERFORMANCE 32. THE PERFECT DOOR IS A SPHERE 33. I CAN’T FIND A THING 34. PERFORM THE IMAGINARY STONE 35. ALL WORDS COME FROM O 36. IT IS A POEM IF YOU BELIEVE IT 37. I TEACH ME 38. THERE ARE 100 HEARTBEATS IN THE ROOM 39. WHAT’S ABOVE PERFECT 40. THE SILK WRITING CHAIR MAKES YOU SIT UP STRAIGHT AND IS SOFT AT THE SAME TIME 41. I LOVE MAYB 42. THE STONE MAKES ME WANT TO KEEP 43. THE EXHIBITION RECALLING THE ATTENTION OF THE CITY 44. THE END OF NAME 45. I MADE THE POETIC FLAG OF SWITZERLAND IN THE TRADITION OF THE IMAGINARIES 46. I WROTE A WORD THAT KNOCKS YOU OUT 47. BLACK CHAMPAGNE IS A POEM 48. THIS IS 7 THINGS 49. HER LAUGH IS SILENT 50. I SEE THE WORD ON MY BREATH 51. THE PEDESTAL FOR LISTENING TO PERFECT 52. LAUGHING OVER MY SENTENCES IS A GOOD WAY TO SHOW THEM 53. WATCH NOW I’LL PERFORM IN YOUR IMAGINATION 54. I MISS B. 55. GOD TAKES THE FIRST PERSON 56. I VOCALLY PUBLISH 57. THE PLAY OF GREAT IS GR. 58. SH 59. I’M LAOTZU POCHUI CHUTA BASHO ISSA ZEAMI AND HAKUIN 60. FROM NOW ON YOU WILL HEAR PERFECT EVERY ALL THE TIME 61. STEPPING OVER THE STONE IS MYSTIC 62. A WORD IS YOUR EPITOME 63. I HAVE EVERY HUMAN GLORY 64. SELFCONSCIOUSLY FORGET SELFCONSCIOUSNESS 65. I MADE IT OF THOUGHT 66. THE PERFECT WHISPER IS TO NOTHING 67. THE HIGH ROMANCE OF THE LILAC ARROW 68. GUESS WHAT MIND CAME BY AGAIN 69. MY CHEEKS TINGLE WITH A 100 KISSES ON THE LEFT AND A 100 KISSES ON THE RIGHT 70. IT’S A WORLD COMPLIMENT 71. I’M 50 72. I DON’T THINK A WORD IS EVER LITTLE FOR ME 73. ARE YOU SO SOPHIS AS TO THINK YOU COULD TRY TO TELL A LIE 74. I MET A SAINT PERSON 75. I WROTE THE FIRST TOTALLY INTERROGATIVE PHILOSOPHY 76. SAY BOTH TO THIS STONE 77. TOT. TRU. 78. WHAT’S A WATERLILY TO MONET 79. JOKES DON’T EXIST 80. YOU GATHER 700 PEOPLE TOGETHER AND TELL THEM TO THINK ABOUT THEIR PSYCHE 81. THE GREAT ART SHOW MOTHER AND DAUGHTER GO TO EUROPE 82. THE PEARL COVERED BOOK OF BOTH 83. I SAID GR. ONCE IN THE MUSEUM THAT WAS THE EXHIBITION 84. I PUT THE PERFECT SIGH IN A STONE 85. THE GHOST OF BOOK 86. INFLUENCE IS IMPOSSIBLE 87. THE CENTER OF THE ROOM IS HOLY 88. I SAW HIM OVER THERE 89. THIS WAY TO THE MIRACLE PLAY 90. A SINGLE SYLLABLE IS ELOQUENT 91. A MYSTIC DIALOGUE B. SAYS TH FL TO IN PH C. SAYS YES 92. HISTORY IS A CONSTANT 93. I HUM WHEN I THINK 94. IT’S THE FIRST TIME YOU SAID SOMETHING I DON’T AGREE WHIT 95. IMAGINE YOU SAY I CHANGE MY MIND THROUGH THE GOLDEN HOLE 96. THERE ARE ONLY 3 GREAT IDEAS IN HISTORY 97. I CANCEL ALL OF MY WORKS AT DEATH 98. THEY SAID OPEN AMERICA IN CONVERSATION ON THE 50TH FLOORS IN N.Y. AND L.A. THAT WAS THE EXHIBITION 99. THE LIGHT OF A KISS 100. DO YOU THINK THERE COULD BE TWO PERFECTS
The day before Arthur’s stroke I’d been in Cincinnati at another Renaissance fair. The performance went well. I swallowed five swords and was paid five hundred dollars. The next day it hurt to drink orange juice and coffee.
Then. Suddenly. The white night was shattered like a glass ball oh a ululating crazy shouting shrieking blaring from downtown up barking of dogs high howling gunshots like crackers with new year thudding thumping cabal. Wind was frightened and came to shake the panes. My uncle jumped up. Kicked over the chair. Blew out the lamp. One last time I saw his eyes were wide and wild to listen better. My little brother started to cry. My aunt keens like a cat in pain. Shhh. Too late. Gun-butts shatter the fogged-over windows someone kicks down the door drunken soldiers with creaking boots with blood-dirtied eyes burst in with lanterns. (They had on thick military coats. And wore sheepskin hats.) Wind blows smoke down the chimney. Smoke churns drunkenly round the room. Curtains flap white like terrified animals. Somebody overturns the table. Somebody puts fire to the curtains and flames start eating the walls. Somebody pushes me in the small hollow of my back. My little brother cries for his shoes. They shoot my uncle by the back door near the woodshed in the snow (he dies crouched small the way sparrows perish in the winter). My aunt’s hair falls loose from her bun. She thrashes through the snow like a hysterical witch. And she screams screams screams. A soldier without trousers drags her into the nearest dead house. I clutch my little brother’s hand. He’s crying for his shoes. He’d always been a coward my little brother.
We were all herded to the market square. There was a big fire right in the middle (the snow all around was orange gold) and there were people in the fire. People bellow like cows. Are milling about. Foam at the mouths. People swing in doorways with snapped necks and limp hands and protruding eyes. Big open eyes like those of doves. I think: Solomon sings oh your eyes like those of doves my beloved. People lie torn apart in the snow with stiff hands and their buttocks high in the air. Houses burn like bonfires. People run stumble flounder stir in the snow. As if dancing. A dance from hell. The soldiers are hoarse. They hammer white-hot iron rods through the ears of people. People die kneeling in the snow staring uncomprehendingly at the brains cupped in their hands. They tie people together and torch them. People run like fire horses over the white snow. I think: Samson releases the foxes with torches attached to their tails in the white wheat fields of the Philistines. They cut off the small breasts of girls and rub coarse salt in the wounds. Girls claw holes in the snow like crazed rabbits. They string people upside down from the verandas and split them with bayonets. Halved people hang in rows and the blood drips pif-pif-paf in the snow. Their mouths are wide open like the mouths of idiots. A dance. A hell-dance.
The market square was too small. All of us children were taken to the church. The school was right next-door. The dead children are thrown down the latrines of the school. (The church had no lavatories.) Soldiers chop holes in the Danube’s ice-skin. People are pushed under the skin of ice. Hundreds. Fifteen hundred people die with helpless hands with barren eyes with grimaced mouths. The men are castrated. All are done away with men women children (the dogs run away).
A soldier grabs us and runs with us to a house with empty eyes. He hides us under a bed. The room smells of apples. The soldier’s eyes are rolling in his head his beard his eyebrows are singed his cheeks are blackened his hands are red. He was a neighbor. He knocks over a chair by the door. It clatters. He curses. He runs off tchuf-tchaf in the snow. I hear children crying in the church. They smash the children to death with chairs.
And then it was still. The white wind gone. My tongue cleaves to my throat my eyes are of cork. My little brother is holding on to my dress he presses his head to my young breasts small like pomegranates in the early summer he shivers terribly. He’d always been such a coward my little brother.
I think of the white bodies of people in the white snow. And all about the red stains. White and red. I think: she was pregnant and sewing by the window and she pricked her finger with the needle (there was snow outside) and there was a clear drop of blood and then she thought oh it will be a girl with a skin like snow and lips like blood and I’ll call her Snow White. I think: tomorrow the bodies will be blue and bloated (I shudder) and the bodies under the ice will be heavy soaked with water and the fishes (they are also soaked with water) will eat the bodies and become fat. It was quiet.
Only from afar (and closer and closer) I could hear the wolves cough and whimper excitedly (nearly in a panic) as they trotted with warm and wet snouts sniffing the snow (and loped with ears feeling down the air). White wolves come snuffling over the snow. White. Even the trees’ beards were white (new white beards) and when the trees shift their stiff branches (from which people grow) the snow falls ploof in the snow. It was the night of Xmas.
She keeps the Absolute in her eyes, and the Absolute hovers around her. So she can walk out of the city of flowers into the desert wearing no clothes at all, and men don’t interfere. All are welcome to look at her body, because her body isn’t anything, her body was discarded by her husband. White as jasmine, devoted to my name, wild, she scares men away. Her love is stronger than their eyes.
She's my wife in her heart, she crosses the desert alone, in pain and naked, passing between stones, singing to me. “Why don’t you show your face?” She begs the birds and the silkworms, the monkeys and the fiery sun, “Where is he, my Spek white as a book, sky-inhabitor?” She has me confused with an unknown god, my unreachability has given me divinity in her blood, she feels my divinity as pain.
Each grain of the desert finds the dune it belongs to, and each dune helps in holding up the sky. She passes between a dune of heedlessness and a dune of anger without climbing onto either. She settles her body into a dune of permitting, which sighs to feel her back against it. Written in the sand are words that never blow away, right where everybody can see them, STUTTER, CLUMSY, MISTAKE and the words have a single heart drawn around them all, and the heart is beating.
On the bridge I watched a man-sized bird balance a row of neatly-lined human skulls, stopping a beat to beak at the white worms wriggling in those empty sockets, those of nose and eyes. The bird craned low its long neck and pecked, inspected, pecked, one-by-one down the line, each time stopping a beat to admire—or maybe consider—the neatly-lined rows of teeth.
The bridge is a suspension bridge suspended between two bluffy cliffs, deep-down bottom dropped out, a body gorged, belly rusting with the broken-down bodies of bombers, Second World War or something thereafter. Weather blazes a backward trail, blazed and baking sun a setting, a shadow fanning imprint in the mud, or an impression of the weight of extinction. The crushing shape of a ribcage.
History impresses its weight on the spine of the scoliosis codex. Each passing day a new layer of skin spans over the redraw, a new dead layer of skin to tusk at shed exoskeletons. And each passing day is a lesson: how to mask the crippled limp; withstand the concussions of trench warfare. Curled into the center is all our tension, suspended—the cardinal point of free fall, from which to make our leap.
Noah sees himself as a child and the child is one of those children violent and swinging from branches and this is when there was sun if there ever was sun because Noah’s memory is clouded with images. Noah’s memory is a gravestone in a cemetery where a pick-up has backed onto the head and now the stone is halved and what is underneath is no longer a body but remembering how bodies used to be. When Noah was a child the children were all about decapitation and sorrow. When Noah was a child there was rain unstoppered from that liquored-up sky. When Noah was a child there was no ark, because Noah had not yet built it.
Noah has no sister and this is why: To make a sister take parents in rows of two and put them together facing one another and move them up and down and wait for all the other moments in the world to happen. To make a sister crush her like a sandwich where one thing goes on the top of another on top of another on top of another. To make a sister exhaust all the boys with running or monkey bars then wait an eternity for the movement of the world to slow. This is why Noah has no sister. Noah has no sister because of these and all the other things.
Noah is a man who is building an ark. Noah’s muscles are hammers and Noah’s mouth is nails spit out. The rain is coming down. When Noah is out and up on the ark that is half-built, the rain is happening and in it he hears himself telling himself to build an ark. In this way it doesn’t come from any god or from the sky or opened up out of his own mouth but instead from the rain and the way it falls on his partially constructed deck. Noah’s eyes are saws that trim stolen and found wood to length. Noah is a man because he is building an ark or in spite of this ark building. Noah is a man because the rain is coming down and there is no one else for it to come down upon.
Noah has in his half-built ark a garden that will house plants already soaking up the water though they are only seeds and are showing no green. All the green that was leaves has turned gray via missiles, has turned gray via screaming, has turned gray with all the violent moments that were threaded together to make Noah’s neighborhood a firestorm, to make Noah’s house an only image, to make Noah a man building an ark in the rain with a garden by himself. The seeds that Noah plants are children. The seeds that Noah plants are sisters. The seeds that Noah plants are men and memories. Women. The seeds that Noah plants in his garden on this incomplete ark are nails and hammers and saws. Muscles and memories and images. The seeds that Noah plants will always be drowning in coming-down rain. Noah makes a garden, Noah builds an ark. These will be Noah’s new memories, even in this rain.
I’ve been up to so little lately; however, preparing food takes time. It is hot here. I shower frequently. The heat has dulled my mind and character, but awakened in me the instinct to migrate north. Only the very young and the very old are at risk (that is what the authorities report). But measured against the old, I am very young. And measured against the young, I am very old. I see no way out of this paradox. In any case, there is only the weather to talk about. The old highs are becoming the new lows (that is what the authorities report). Listen, I’ve decided to consolidate my vocabulary. (You still haven’t answered my question. Why else does the thesaurus exist?) There is no distance between instinct and fear, but the distance between parsley and dill is absolute. That is the simpler science and so it is more perfect. Today I am generous; I feel like a teacher. It is possible to sweeten the flesh. Please, follow my lead. Boil water. Add celery, carrot, parsley, pepper, nutmeg.
The ordinary hallway is an oddly discordant use of space When blocked off, its full length operates in memory as a recollection of the absent movement. But in use, only a part of the hallway serves for the passage of the figure. The figure passes through the hallway never directly in the middle, towards the entrance or exit at the end. The end, which exists as negative space rather than positive space, is not functional, only present. Hallways are always uninhabited.
X X
X X
X X
X X
X X
The hallway walls index the difficulties exposed in the building. They are set too far from the body. When using the hallway, hands fail to brush the side-walls. The space between the hallway and the body is too distanced.
You've convinced me . . . Now go out and make me do it.
I’d rather not have a baby, but I know that perversely, I really actually want to be pregnant. Ideally, this would be a pregnancy without birth. I would keep the baby inside me, protected, subconscious, forever. A pregnancy without terms. I’ve been obsessed and possessed by this idea since adolescence, which is also when I started writing poetry. To me, poetry and pregnancy are the same thing. It is about the potentiality of new life, new voice. Yet both are things I cannot allow. I will not pretend to do anything good with my poetry, which is a voice unborn even in manifestation, which will not gaze back at me in the forest of symbols, which will always be embodied without body, dark, not human. This isn’t meant to have a negative connotation, this hysterical and endless pregnancy. I think it is a metaphor of incipience, desire, possession, and incubation. It’s only termination is death, the ultimate potentiality.
The non-result is “the pregnancy of decadence, which is full of fetuses.”
The non-result is proliferation: “Pigs are everywhere.”
1) Hysterical pregnancy as an allegory for human existence. In my interaction with creatures who identify as people, I’ve witnessed quite a bit of talk about “souls,” “feelings,” “interiority,” and so on. “Really?” I ask (rhetorically). As Sylvia Plath correctly says, “There is nothing there.” Neither in the women’s belly or in the sub-flesh of the human. It’s all empty. But I don’t think the lack of highfalutin ideals should bring anyone down. No one says you have to be human. With enough courage, you can be anything you want. I mean, you can be a boy who fights pirates in green outfits or a girl who kills her husband/daddy.
2) I think “adult” is an insulting term. I’d much rather read the poems of the lost boys than those composed by Grown Up Male Writers.
MOTHER MARY, CUM TO ME. I DO NOT FIT INTO THE ANTHOLOGY. I AM A FLITTING, FLAMING BIRD WITH A PREGNANT THROAT. I EAT NUBILE WORMS AND STROKE FEATHERY BREASTS.
I am a dirty potato. My body touches the worms you pull up through the geosmin smeared earth. Mr Potato Head is my lover. I pull out his arms and his plastic penis and put it in my eye socket.
THE GUSH OF THE EYE AND THE CHILDREN YOU SEE. I AM A WORM-BALLOONED BODY WAITING TO POP WHILE YOU BLIND YOURSELF WITH POTATO FAITH. YOU IN THE GROUND, ME HERE UP HIGH, TOGETHER WE BLEED OUT A RAINBOW.
Baby bird engorged with rice worms. A bird sacrifices itself so I can harvest its shiny sharp beak. I stick the beak into my lover’s nose hole. Lover, hover over you. The blind liver of the potato makes clear worm blood. The blood in you strains for the blood in him.
YES. I SPILL AIDS IN THE SKY, AND THEN PEE-COCKS TAKE FLIGHT WITH WING-DICKS. THEN I BLESS YOUR POTATO AS AN UNDIFFERENTIATING MASS OF INFANT FLESH. I ALWAYS LONGED TO SPROUT IN DARK CLOSETS.
Dodo Christ, you are so fat you are sinking into potato darkness. My potato uterus feels your undulating belly mass, barely protected from the beak of my lover. Your belly is also your face and your back. Dorsal vulnerability invites the horror film of thanksgiving to the earth table.
O, I AM THE WALRUS IN STRAWBERRY FIELDS. I FLOP ON LAND INSTEAD OF CRUISING TWIN CHEEKS. WHEN MY FAMILY STABS ME, I LOOK TO YOUR POTATO UTERUS AND KISS YOUR BIG CHEEK. YOU AND I MASH BY SHARING A SIDELONG GAZE. I WOULD LIKE TO GIVE YOU ONE OF MY BIRD BALLS.
My dirty potato eyeless eyes seep wormy tears as my lover pokes a hole in your back. O now you are a whale, an earthen, breached, stuffed, urthen wail. I hold you in my nonexistent compost arms. A compacted bird ball falls out of the whole. Now you can breath. I wait for the ball to roll towards me. I hope my gravity is strong enough, the small gravity of a starch tot.
MARY YOU ARE SO STRONG YOU ARE THE DICK TO MY MOBY.
Hallelujah. My entire cheek body is a bloated cock without a gobble. In the darkness of my white inside your techno voice beats the desire of my plastic lover, whose stinger falls out, whose air blood leaks out as a forever last breath.
OUR COCK IS SO MULTICOLORED THAT COUNTRIES SPILL OUT FROM IT. OCEANS WE GLUG IN, HOT THIRD WORLD SHIT WE SPOUT. MADE IN CHINA OUT OF WOOD FROM BRAZIL, WE ARE PINOCCHIO.
Cluck. Pinocchio stuffing hatches from your blowhole. Feathers land. You cock your head at me but none blink. I worm myself inside the beige shell of my dying lover. Now my holes double. Now I push out the feet, the hair, the bow, the wagging lips, all eggs splat. We are Pinocchio.
I don’t want to change anything. I love products. They’re immortal. My Stitch teddy bear will never die. He doesn’t have a heart or lungs. He’s not vulnerable. He’ll keep going. I continue to find it vexing to go from hanging out with Gods to human beings. There’s such a drop in quality. People aren’t built for infinity. Most of them only last 80 years or so. They’re impermanence makes me uncomfortable. How can I develop a glamorous, hyperbolic relationship with something if it’s not forever? Marriage is supposed to be forever. But marriage is an adult institution. So really, as the divorce numbers show, it’s not. Adults are not extreme: they’re pragmatic, reasonable: they’re people. Adults only live for so long. They’re inevitably going to stray and find other adults to interact with. They want to make the most of their time. But children never deviate. In none of the Pooh books does Christopher Robin make a human friend. He socializes exclusively with Pooh and his other inhuman associates. He’s extreme. He fully embraces the material despotism. Adults find ways to mitigate it. But I don’t like half-measures. I want the whole thing. The adult movie makes me think of mediocrity and Obama. The child movie makes me think of glamour and Lady Gaga. Everything is a product in varying degrees of intensity. My goal is to be the most intense.
I cannot fully mesh entirely with a narrative that is intended to be read entirely on a level of empathy. I prefer there to be a constant awareness that what is being read (or written) is a text, a book, a narrative, etc. I hate the idea of liking a book because you can “relate to a character,” in fact a lot of the time I don’t like characters, realistic ones at least. I like characters more as ideas, completely flat, lacking depth. Events over an over-wrought psychology, etc. But that’s not my point, nor is it what I want to talk about.
As someone who is queer, I like reading books by queer authors, queer narratives. As someone who is arguably a pervert, I also like reading erotica, particularly of the French vein. And in the history of French literature there is an abundance of smutty stories, and what I like about these stories is that they are literary (let’s pretend that this means something even though the “genre” of literary fiction in and of itself is a useless demarcation). I have nothing against smut for the sake of smut, it’s great, but you know, I’m also a whore for form and structure and extra-textual shit (in Barthes’s terms, I am more a fan of the “writerly text”). I actually like it when an entirely smutty story has some pretension that its form is transgressing its content, in fact I love it. Whether it works or not is always interesting, it’s just something that I’m way into.
The history of ‘literary’ queer fiction, especially in terms of queer fiction that is more overtly “writerly” (experimental, avant-garde, whatever), is littered almost primarily with desire for young boys.
Even in heterosexual literary erotica the object of desire is most often a young teenage girl (for examples: Pierre Louys, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Bernard Noel, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, etc, etc). Alternatively, sometimes the young lusty female is the subject of desire instead of the object, taking what is occasionally the first person perspective, or at least the locus of a third person narrative (consider what are arguably the ultimate classics of French Erotica: Story of O, Emmanuelle, and Bataille’s quintessential Story of the Eye).
Basically what I’m saying is that I want to read novels that are basically Alain Robbe-Grillet’s late-70s narratives, except for my own pleasure, I want there to be middle-aged hunks instead of 14 year old girls lying dead on the table, naked, blood spilling over the empty white floor.
destruction and creation are entwined. The Nazis destroyed massive amounts of land and human bodies. But they also created ghettos, barracks, gas chambers, pits, and fake train stations. I don’t mention the Nazis to shock. But I bring them up because I believe they revealed how the world works. The word “Nazi” inspires so much discomfort because of the suspicion that their society isn’t that different from American world. The latter just does a better job of covering up its goals of mass objectification and homogeneity. Let’s look at gay marriage. When New York legalized it, Frank Bruni (NYT’s 1st openly gay columnist) published a column entitled “To Know Us Is To Let Us Love.” Bruni implies that the only way you can love is through marriage. But I don’t show my love for my teddy bears by marrying them. Sometimes I show my love for them by throwing them off the bed or hurling them at the wall. But this is violent (Nazi, tyrannical) and frowned upon. But wouldn’t my version of love be closer to democracy since it’s different? Isn’t everyone showing their love in the same way nearer to Nazism since it signifies uniformity?
The male heterosexual show is composed of corny jokes, below average costumes, and semi-gay hair products. The man hetero is like the un-Nazi genocides. Their single preoccupation with the female body – conquering the vagina as if it was actually a vagina – is quite shallow and not cute in the least. There’s no piles of shoes in the male hetero movie.
these are deserter’s songs, coward’s songs. I am all for reassessing cowardice. The most important lyric on Fuck Death is “run away.” It’s a bit heavy, especially because the dominant 2011 story is that kids want to live on an invisible beach within their hearts and party this stuff away. But not all kids scorn uneasiness. And not all music is made for kids.
The new mantra is: we have no demands. We don’t want political representation. We don’t want collective bargaining. We don’t want a seat at the table. We want to leave be, to leave being. We have no demands.
The power behind the ‘no demands’ posture is precisely that it makes no claim about power at all. Instead it seeks to upend the power circuit entirely via political nonparticipation. It would be wrong to cast this aside using the typical epithets of cynicism or nihilism, or even to explain it away using the language of state power versus terrorism, which we should remember is the language of Lenin just as much as it is the language of Bush, Obama, Sarkozy, and all the rest, for the key to this new political stance is in its subtractivism vis-à-vis the dimensions of being.
I like genitals. But not genitals as human body parts: genitals as commodities. Penises are pleasing to look at because they look like Super Soakers. I’ve used these water guns before. They’re powerful. They can knock down a beehive and make them buzz all over the place. That’s what I want in my poetry: to cause chaos. I don’t think that there needs to be productive chaos, like it has to aim to close the income equality gap. But chaos in general is fine. I don’t want to be content and secure. I want to be sharp and on my tiptoes. I don’t want my poems to be dull. I’d prefer them to be messy, disordered, and threatened: it makes you stronger, tougher, and more alert. Vaginas can produce disruption as well. They make me think of suburban houses. You enter a home the same way you enter a vagina. But it’s the penetrated, not the penetrator, who has the power. When you go into a person’s house, you’re under their rules. You eat what they serve and act according to their values. The house sets the program, not the guest. I don’t think there should be gender wars to prove that one is better than the other. But I like the idea of Super Soakers and houses constantly clashing. A battle of commodities is much preferable to the status quo.
If you say something in a poem you should mean it and be prepared to implement it in Earthly life. If a magic genie gave me the chance to make my poems come true I’d accept his offer without blinking.
I want to be exploited. If presented with the two options: privilege or oppression, give me oppression. I don’t want the right to vote, run my own company, leave the house, have consensual sex, &c. All these activities require some sort of human body. I don’t believe the human body is worth my time. I’d much prefer if it and other human bodies would stay out of my sight. There are superior bodies to interact with, which is why the heteronormative housewife is ideal. She’s constantly in contact with laundry machines, clothes, and mass-market food. There’s value in these products. You can learn more from a cherry Pop-Tart (Kellogg’s) than a human. The “naked human” (to use Arendt’s term) is worthless. It’s the things they buy, wear, and use that make their personhood supposedly inviolate. Without these supplements – mass market food, smartphones, name-brand deodorant – the person is nothing. I’d rather align myself with where the power is at: in the commodity. The human is secondary: all humans are subjugated: they’re all under the tyrannical rule of the mass-produced product.
Instead of fighting the capitalistic system, join it, be it, subvert it. Screw the human: love the product. I’ll be as fake, plastic, cinematic, soap-operatic, made-up as possible. The human world isn’t about niceness, compassion, generosity: it’s centered on objects. When a boy says this, he’s being mean, insensitive, ungrateful for the privileges he has. But when a girl says this, she’s making commentary on feminism and patriarchal structures. Why can the girl’s violence social commentary? Why can’t the boy’s? Why does anyone’s violence need to be turned into social commentary? Why can’t it just be amoral? Do people still believe in right and wrong? A Pop-Tart doesn’t care about good or bad: it just wants to be devoured.
Ariana Reines: “Eat me. / Eat me. / Silence of eternity.”
Don’t respect me, don’t treat me with equality and rights, don’t tell me my corporeal body has importance when really it’s the H&M corduroys that adorns them. My skin is secondary. The garment is supreme. The pants actually cost money. Don’t try and fool me or trick me. I know I’m only as valuable as my Visa credit card.
The “childish” language is intended to unsettle. When adults try to have sex, the children come crying into the room. While adults try to have a relaxed, composed meal, the children begin to squeal. The adults want to carry out their mature activities, but the children are invariably there. The child is a virus: a disruptive, agitating force that cannot be discarded.
The Garden of the Gods pushes the inevitability of entropy even further. It is sited in the old Packard Plant, a 3.5 million square foot facility, nearly half a mile in length and believed to be the largest abandoned industrial site in the United States, which has been abandoned for decades. On a section of collapsed roof in the building designed by Detroit's premier architect Albert Kahn, Hocking placed a series of old wooden TV consoles he found on a lower floor atop structural columns that had remained upright. Over a period of months, some of the columns toppled and more of the roof collapsed, events also documented photographically. Named after a sedimentary rock formation in southern Illinois, Garden of the Gods isn't a ritual of mourning but an acknowledgment of natural processes that have occurred throughout history.
Could attention be a form of violence? Matt Henriksen’s speaker tests the surface of things as with a knife-blade, learning its tensile qualities, trying to do no harm. He confronts Nature’s cipher, its true face and its false face, its audible face and its ocular face, its adorned face and its blank face. This is metaphysical inquiry wherein the smallest unit opens on the largest, something on nothing, the living on the dead.
What is new about modern poetry is that confronted with a world that glorifies man so much the more it reduces him to an object, modern poetry unmasks the humanitarian ideology by making it rigorously its own the boutade that Balzac puts in Beau Brummel’s mouth: “Nothing less resembles man than man.” Apollinaire perfectly formulated the proposition in Les peintres cubists, where he writes, “above all, artists are men who wish to become inhuman.” Baudelaire’s antihumanism, Rimbaud’s call “to make one’s sole monstrous,” the marionette of Kleist, Lautremont’s “is it a man or a stone or a tree,” Mallarme’s “I am truly decomposed,” the arabesque of Matisse that confuses human figures and tapestries, “my ardor is rather of the order of the dead and unborn” from Klee, “the human doesn’t come into it” of Gottfried Benn, to the “nacreous snail’s trace” of Eugenio Montale, and “the head of the medusa and the Robot” of Paul Celan.
Jack horkheimer is named best humen to live yet!! jack horkheimer was one of the top boosted individuals of this earth. what can we learn by studyeing his lief trajectory?
trouble was: 6:53am & i didn’t know how to get back to potsdam. i’ll show you which train to take. she blinked. we closed the door on the party & stepped into sunday, empty berlin. it drizzled blue dawn. when was the last time you were in america by the way? 10 months ago i visited my sister in new york, she buttoned her pea coat, other than that, it’s been 2 years. i touched her lip, then the small of her back, how’d you get those rain drops stuck under your skin? we turned a corner. if there had been tread on my sneakers, they would have squeaked on the wet pavement. sometimes i can’t remember the words to my favorite song, she took my hand. the train station was across the street. i pulled her from under the awning, we belong in a movie, & let my nose rest on hers. take this line all the way to the end. i lit a lucky strike, i wonder if my dad ever felt this way, i hope so. we walked down our own flights of stairs & stood facing each other from our platforms. i’m less than amazing, you know? she jammed her hands in her pockets, her irises retreated to ovals of white & dark blue halos. i think i’d like to be in love with you for a long time
Yellow even level, level or worms. Yelling evens levels, level our worms. Even veiled evens now. Level evens veils even levels. Level even veiled even leveled. Or rotted. Worms or rot, more silence. Yellow even levels, leveling is now greeting. Evens violate evening, now silence. Levels even violate, even level silence. Level even vent even level. Or rots. Worms or rotting means silence. Even now even violate. Veiled even is leveled evening, done. Evens vote, evens now silent. Now or whispering. Level even veiled even light. Even vent even now silent. Veils even in lighted silence. Even veiled even now. Levels evening veiled evening levels. Level even votes even level. Even violates even now. Veiled evening in lighted evens, done. Even vented even now. Leveled even vents even levels evening done. Or rot. Rotted or turning, turning even, done.
I want to do a piece where I go to the Alps and talk to a mountain. The mountain will talk of
things which are necessary and always true, and I shall talk of things which are sometimes,
accidentally true.
I dropped a dish and broke it while listening to a record. So I just played the record backwards until the dish came together again on the floor and hopped up to my hands.
The mechanization of noise, industrial revolution to tiny computers clucking handheld racket, acts as full aggressor for the conglobation of art now. Speed and factory progress what’s modern: the fragment, being caught off guard. Russolo classifying screeches, Ball inventing speed metal, Duchamp violating the staircase’s history with skins, Marinetti’s guillotine autos stomaching his will, cars a holocaust of beeps, World War I erupted symptomatically of the industrial bangs navigating uncharted trauma along landscapes, in heads. Destruction as advancement: “The closest experience to trench warfare before winter 1914 in civilian society was to be found in the wreckage of a railway accident” (Leese 15). “Engineer’s malady,” product of screeching mortars or random bombs from the air, the repeat-firing weapon, shell-shock initiated a society rushing clumsily ahead. The old concept of valiant warfare tested on ears forced deaf, chemically influenced bodies, bullets in clouds instead of aimed. People dismantled by their making. People as leftovers knew less about meaning. “These symptoms constitute an idiom of suffering and sickness: a physical style for expressing inner pain, which was bound in time and culture” (Leese 2). Schopenhauer – barely withstanding clopping carriages and whip cracks, arguing at his kindest for the dignity of suicide, noise a fury poisoned outward from cultures forming, reasons to be places, soldiers of getting it done, what’s worth being around after every hollow purpose – might explode in the metal tundra, hear motors bubbling and fall down. The brain allows fresh failures. Electrodes pitter patter constantly below the screech, a tease inside cramped spaces where silences threaten people to mock talk more, the tweet, the caller in your pocket, soothing buzz overlaying cacophonies outside, fun. The hunger of everything metal – metal feels like something that can only be shined with blood. God was a chime kicked by poets and the mystery shrank with Darwin. Churches offered a falser hush to buck loutish and daily terror, were again proven uselessly fancy with the coming of the atom. The atomic bomb shrank the world to the size of art. People built themselves a hole with pride, became so obsessed with newfound meaninglessness the overpopulation of their own birth dissimilated, abstracted into irony: nothing to do, knowing life as a mere button press, but giggle at accomplishment. Faith a process of learning not to know, stupid existences transcend. Feed yourself to noise, be carried somewhere ugly. The internet makes knowledge here and as pointless as breathing. Stein’s loop tangles backward, seething below her language, stepping away to let noise reflect. Not a societal challenge, but silence cut and spangled. Tzara pulls words out of hat and names the modern technique of editing. Joyce bends that process to something hoity, radio phrases from the big museum in his brain. Psychology shocks art by purporting how brains exist. That dreams can be unpacked. The non sequitur instills art, collage and automatic writing, whatever happens, pen to page, let Freud sort it. Neurasthenia is a pathological disease affecting the mind and the central nervous system. The social stigma of shell shock turned poets dicey. Who with any sensitivity alive could not feel the affect great or small without need of seeing war. Artists still wear the armband of mass disgust in all societies: “blue armband…which inescapably describes who he is (an inmate)…and drew the attention of the local community” (Leese 117). The only way toward peace from mass culture and noise forms as a revolt of its characteristics. Due rights of disgust with any system rude enough to have artists who won’t be put to death, are forced to wander neglected, shouting hellos when silence is scary. Djuna Barnes says: “To think is to be sick.” Thought already divides as tumor and process, static and edit, the shindig of apocalypse in our ears. Barnes knew how to make her lovers bark, some pleasantries do shout. At worst, the spectacle of our collapse will tickle, at best the earth just quits. Has society concocted any taboos not endured by journalists and voting? To record the scream of a century burning itself out. “And neurosis mirrored a society dominated by discipline and hierarchy and social taboos and that it was a pathological expression of a sense of guilt” (Ouředník 65). The ability to sit still has become a type of gold. To project without listening as the relaxation of lesser morals in society, the sudden clipping off of internal blather without consequence, silence amalgamates the wise from all ambition. “If the microphone is only used to make oneself heard, then one has mistaken the microphone for a mallet,” (UltraRed 2). In the anarchic assemblage of varied song, sound as mosaic descriptor reinvents autobiography. Primitivist meshing unfolds inside. The barest inkling of structure turns felt. The trundling outerwear a unique blare of patterns accorded to rhythm. Speech is history turned jagged, slow to evolve beat by beat. Rousseau was whiter than his agency of guesswork concerning “savages”, etc, wore a bowtie to discuss arts he could not reach, wrote himself outdated. The drumbeat of war was a prophecy for driving to buy groceries. New noise exists away from human boundaries. The mix tape carnival, grotesque catalogue of twirl and joke, manufactured growls sweating darkly, with papier-mâché abandon in the dream speak we falter, children since explanations fail, love a mere billboard of groins. The listener knows subjugation. Reality and all weak innovations toward verisimilitude subvert the unknown. The commonality of limited composure embodies walking. Wretched as the cityscape angularly taut around us, moved like someone broken into unwilled postures. Spidery lengths cantankerously knife property recognized. Only through static can we reattach our sockets and maintain. Pulp the stolen aesthetics scrutinized by control, nightmare prayers. Mike Patton played the new bible with his throat. The viral video shaded whimsical for a contagious relic, found as a psychic time bomb brought here from some alien ecosystem. Inherent with the fast slaughter needed. A fantasia of ear aches settles the sidewalk. We suffer a gigantic diet of traffic, turned cubist in our sin. Temperature can be dogma if we stay superior and dizzy. Something grouped within communication will keep us angry. Pauses hint between undulations. Gears freeze mid-stroke and consider their turning. The only music left, the sound of being kicked.
Marinetti ate his food cold and reinvented dumb explosions in his head. He wanted to survive as a poet and this made him disgusting. He wrote a play with robots before the term robot was invented. His robots hurt each other having sex. He was in a car accident from which he emerged better. He lowered art to punch and speed, claimed war as hygiene, ironically wanted to survive this way supported by fascists. It did not work, but his ideas survive like thought bubbles over an urn.
Marinetti invited hecklers. He wanted to read his proclamations against antiquity to crowds that hurt him. In this way, along with Jarry, he was the first contemporary poet. By aligning himself with war, hatred, rampant squelch, his work embodied the twentieth century. The lute song being stomped. Italy felt like a mausoleum of pride, gushing ears full of hair. It became necessary to burn art that wasn’t change, reflected by the din of cars, slapped from mechanized hullabaloo. Marinetti needed to hurt the page, wanted young poets to be so angry they would scalp him as he aged. Marinetti worshipped the suicide bullet mid path. He grinned for the great mass of humanity to go yapping down sharp tunnels. Art is the break away from wisdom, the anti-sitting. Had Marinetti surpassed his politics he would have been the greatest artist alive. Had he died sooner, his work would have been a vision of the coming grind and earned the full realization of its shape, like Mayakovsky.
Mayakovsky went into a corner and ate bullets, fed through his chest a few times. He played roulette with his balls. Proper futurists shoot their body; leave the head to spin aftermaths. Mayakovsky wrote anthems culled from a nature he never lived. Marinetti was jealous of Mayakovsky’s banishment. He went after Mayakovsky’s tombstone with a hammer, lived a pious fifteen more years, joining the army as an old man, charging senile toward some enemy. Only a heart attack could stop him.
Mayakovsky became the bullhorn of his death, propaganda player. Marinetti cried that no one killed him. The task of doing it himself felt like a task and too right. He felt neglected by the growing quiet, the lack of violence in his life. He craved ruckus, the awkward insights once you’ve lost. Marinetti was the underdog of his own creed. He dueled intending to lose and always won. He chased dogs for the purpose of getting caught. He felt like a coward for being unfortunately alive. No one remembers Marinetti beyond his statements. He is frowning in a very silent hell. We feel guilty and pelt his grave with sonic harm. We smash the dirt where he’s buried, not enough. Marinetti eventually pandered to Jesus and got married. We burn his works for that, not because he wants us to.
Russolo conducted gradations of pitch to wake ambulatory harmonies breathing inside adrenaline, straddling gibberish, to dominate nature. Marinetti wrote Russolo love letters about shell shock, thought himself free of its effects with an insane ideal, spelled out explosions. The first artistic reaction of the twentieth century was to place one's smile against a bullet, to get stupid in your own heat. To shingle our idiocy by the light of what kills us, to eradicate self in the name of creation. Culture adjusted by noises fed big, a stoma through art. We, hostages of clang, speak the language of rampage. A revolt detached from irony leaves us silly without guns, well-dressed and bleaker still, ransomed by media, cut and swallowed cell phone to shallow reasons behind crime, excuse for baser needs to hurt. We were making noise since sex began; a less intimidating grime and shuck, whimper disguised as procreation. To stopper that modern urge leans toward grandiose wrongs. The spreading of our kind is a potential not even our kind abides any longer and never did without knowing. We scowl loudly into our nylon bibs, facing gizmo speed. Edification demands grunts cast in the surplus light of our comas; no message equals no cumshot, no catharsis in the shuddering plurality of now, instead all is banging known at once, million-fold gusher. Good art pulls every muscle. Wrangled kaleidoscopic from origins of prance to mate, pocketed noise begs for an artwork loud behind hearing. The mobile crisis, the panicked canvas, a song of fingernails, fire as a toy, no economies, no hope please, tourists with mange, words as strangulation. The silence stated between echoes of edits is all we have.
Read Xeroxed behind meaning, willed away and present, full of calamity and not, crumpled by process, construed from fear of death, shot here slant of evolutions the brain shat. Issue writing from bangs of seizure, free of measure, holy beyond ritual, goofy sciences happening, constricted cell to vessel to amnesia and returning by fire with nothing wanted. Memories, circular and wrong, repeat small impacts, poof and wretch. Adoration of our waste refilling. We talk our nursing homes away, everything a weak stall to the nursing home. A veil of blood memorizes sight. Crack sees no division within noise. Whatever stabs through best: a chance to die sooner is to write. Attach nothing to being alive, addict of sounds we can’t stop making. We write with our fists. Giddy linguistic pap smears wrack free. We resent our births. We remove our lives with such sad ferocity that art becomes our lives. The enemy is sober and informative. Doom is in our hair.
We shuck our bodies to falter verse. No ideas line to line. Only moments falling thereupon, only backstroke and knives, we are the crack huff religion. All skin blocks our blood from the air.
Those considered attractive cling fastest to identity. Stop everything groomed. No petting of opinions because mirrors exist.
The invention of crack cocaine asks for new writers. We find toilet paper in the richest homes on the owners’ tongues. Murder must be primary to going outside. Writers struggle to go outside.
Crack is headfirst American, louder, fatter, grotesque, a bubble from the ass of culture, a screeching heart attack buoyantly awesome, a needle lost in the urethra of progress, not a quiet poem.
We dance without dancing. We salute the stupidity of what sizzles. We jam ourselves into society’s fissure and giggle about socks.
No one contributes to, saves for, participates in, any society at large beyond their own selfish will to survive, beyond their own laughable ambitions to proliferate.
A lower atheism tears god mechanized. Nothing there to deny. Apolitical is too political.
Not near enough suicides clog the street in place of traffic. All paltry substances fund pigs by law. We snort the paint of our gibber. We mean the crack is in our saying. We mean maturity stoppers urge. We are addicted to the scat of our hands.
The idea, joint along with hope, that any poem must achieve maturity, is a yes to morality and common sense, a yay for life, a gaudy approval for the status quo, a “good job” to how things are, so yawn-worthy that the only response is to go far past the conservative cliché this opinion details and get downright silly in the paced slaughter of the sooth-sayer of old and well-meant white boy piss – slit the bowtie first.
So many pissy snouts in money. So little bullets all the same. Fuck veracity. The only genre is infection.
We mistake our tinnitus for the page. We hollow out our grime to submit.
People use the threat of cowardice to enforce a greater cowardice.
We learn our ABCs by sucking the chalk board.
Reagan invented crack deep within his racist bowels, pummeling his vagina with a log, shellacking his penis with Russia, his bullet wounds sporting wigs of diamond. He lives the century backward from all saying, is all about turning the skyline his. The cult of Reagan explodes litter from every hole, super-sized and baying the dust of queens, a doo-wop monarchy ripe with frowns, a dollhouse built of cocaine. Our desks are full of the blisters our halos said. Reagan carried out abortions with his stride, updated the bible with quarantines about himself. Reagan fucked his jewelry and had it killed. Reagan is behind the chatty nature of every drug. The yeast beneath his wrinkles is the twenty-first century’s calendar.
We are the speech of sutures. We have missiles in our hug.
Our flag is made of scars. We worship our own corpses instead of singing songs.
Our poems are lice in the eyes of prosperity and culture.
Our poems won’t survive: the rat trap stuck on a wet jacket of skin. Trailed through the kitchen, in a V of blood, the rat twitching, muscular system exposed, three feet away, dead but free, pointless effort, but amazing, a genius magic trick we bow to, the artist on the tile.
We coddle our waste by ranking it. There is no hierarchy in a coffin.
Pussyfooters of snark, academic wine aficionados tied callow by their stringy balls, the Reich of snoozy nitpicks, to the pissy art of edifice, ideals baked gimpy by courts, courts and their parasitic pews, the pious and ordained, to the clock for being slow – may you all be granted lives long beyond living.
Save for the flail and its evening, our shedding gasoline in expensive rooms, the vulnerable and their beautiful hate, the hate that grins, for the bullet and its path, for Columbine and Christmas, for crack and all its fucked helicopters that let one see, for the rat glowing outside its skin, the lush bounce our heads piffle, for the audience of cuticles, we grow vast inside our blood.
Now the graft whittles loose by the noise of its being snorted, borrows everything we love and performs arson in the gradation of its own jury’s severed wet.
The smoke rising from us is our property.
For instance, Whole Foods had a special section where you could cop a feel of the body part of your dreams. In the window, “Breast, Thighs and Legs” were advertised for as low as 1.79 Wuros/kg. Still and all, love was love, and when Arthur fell for Evelyn he experienced all the emotions he had with his first wife, from whom he had been separated for over a decade. For one thing, Evelyn was fun. While anal sex had been a struggle not only with his wife, but with all his former girlfriends, Evelyn was built to be fucked in the ass. In fact, she was a Greeker’s dream, for all Evelyn was capable of doing was being fucked in the ass. There was something nice about being with a piece of ass. No sooner did Arthur unpack Evelyn from the ice-box in which he carried her around than other men were coveting his great catch. He loved the candlelit dinners where he would seat her on a chair opposite him with her buttocks rearing up into the air like the old stallions in western films of centuries past, nodding in agreement as she emitted the usual hot air. The vacuum-packed asses were guaranteed to break wind, just as the cunts were guaranteed to fart.
The Meta Surrealist salon of 2200 had established the palette for this Brave New World. Jack, the great, great, great, great grandson of the famed Surrealist Salvador Dali, envisioned a race of body parts all aching for consummation. Lone predatory pricks sought out gaping cunt holes devoid of consciousnesses. Like the pathetic fallacy, in which nature is seen to embody the emotion of the objective observer, these body parts often took on a life of their own, a life they in fact probably didn’t possess, as women whose ocular nerves connected to the outside world of phenomena imputed human emotion to manufactured joints. Who was to say that a pumping prick wasn’t expressing love if it produced passion in the cunt of the thinking, liberated woman of 2500? Sum ergo cogito. “I am therefore I think” established itself, as the anti Cartesianists became the ideologues of the new world of mind made flesh. Arthur had actually met Evelyn at an orgy, which occurred in the meat section of a discount club that was the great, great grandchild of the famed Price Chopper. Several drum-sticks had gotten a leg up on her, and she had to fight off several hot breasts to get a live one, a hard cock that stood as straight as Cleopatra’s Needle. Acculturation had left its epigenetic residue, ever so slightly favoring the kind of mixed marriages that Evelyn and Arthur seemed to be headed for. Sure it was fun to play around with other body parts, but when it came down to it, animism was not a way of life. Good old fashioned values like having at least one mind involved in a bond seemed to result in relationships that really lasted, provided the body part and its adult counterpart shared the same religious values. Time and again, cocks that married women and cunts that married men did beautifully, until it came time for childbearing and decisions had to be made about whether to raise junior in the temple, mosque or church.
motherfucker my stains dance
in trumpet cast clouds
by faint progression like torn
skin off money
ho
physicians break my caravan
to crave a scalp this
low
bitch I doggy paddle the stars
in jars of petty absence
where love most is I slapped
a straight jacket on and got fancy
in the cunt of evenings gone
overture of pockets now
swiping my balls on god
Your sex is adjustable according to level of terror.
To take the factory out of saying, to dismantle the mind by returning to people’s earliest output and to construct of that study root cognitions free of contemporary abstraction and cliché, to relieve the constriction of condensed verbiage into less popular contents, breaking by syllable until the recomposed thought has reached mystical apertures between purpose and sound, the ideogram and glyph dumb on the page point without decision, simplistically, but felt.
If a poem could start breathing new paths with its own arrangement, grow eyes from multi-fractured narrators in the same take, a suction of stationary vowel made component within.
What semiotics lifts the creature angry from its bleating, changes our instincts?
The movement seeker protects consumption. Informed by loss consumers advertise. To blunt definition, omitting surface from emotion, to narrowly avoid Catholic techno, elaborating smog for America, equitably sappy, adolescent, progressively sweltered, a family gets particular about neighborhood. Teenagers invest satanic swagger, determine guilt by evolution, because months cost. “My dick finally became huge on my twentieth birthday.” Compared to taxes unsubstantiated, safety the upshot, a parent will kid their mugger. It could be a vast percentage of relatives who say private troughs spill glue.
Mandatory economics shovel the passage right to martyrdom. An unctuous putting of birth cords in the wicker. Students of hapless fact cantankerously unspecified by the hinder they suck. The faculty budget killed a door. What’s on the docket for disease? Usurp a type of equivocal hygiene. Bodily handbooks conduct scars to meaning, ultimatums of pubic liposuction. Superficiality for tit sex in classrooms while aging. Through some bubbles you see girls you loved with scripture in their names. Some you never touched without the police nearing all shrunk and esteemed.
Restricted voluminous to self-injury, big wounds as small media (imagined and physical, masturbation causes tinny choleric grip, quivering cancer glide, plague to the third degree, bionic gimp moves).
Accumulate by mistake, love too young, gloaty religious violence, an attempt to retract all the awkward coitus with each phrase and only creating more.
Squirt 100 percent confetti – the drip you drop, the slip you slop. Spatter during group. Mess improves stanzas. Dowse your iodine with place. Freeze a poem until it’s ready for submission. Some go in your ear. Cake the home, romance and powder, bathe in people’s kids.
Get a lid of sag round your play, a slurpy for quotes.
Wrangle filth a cleaner purpose, step loudly into ninja clothes.
Existing is a plenitude of health and hostility, of sickness and pleasantries.
Sticking your arm inside a radio to chew the skin harmonious, break into song at the sight of chemicals, walking glib between genre fondled kinds of plain for transvestite sayings, arrival toward meaning through fracture because meaning is such a limp chemical implied stochastically. People shit their own meaning in beautiful ways. Survival is the perpetual flaw of our vocation as animals. After all cadaverous humpings drolly laughed through. People could die with such spuriously delicious adjectives.
I am an arsonist when I smile. I think thinking is murder. History is a silly fetish sometimes. But I like history too, because I have some. All this god stuff crowds the orgasm. Baudelaire masturbates like someone with a broken mother. He finds a weapon to carve people out of their separate hibernations from god. Baudelaire is god.
A short history of drive-by shootings via the height of each assassin.
Nothing your labor produces has significance, how freeing, the smooch of torture, the necking dreads.
Sliced aphasic for meaning, words fail the brain - a grand disease disguised as itself - click into vacancies fondled and huffing tune, are punished further, grope the cleft adoringly reset by frictions circular and droned, rabid and nuanced.
Clapping your hands on other people’s hands until human similarities combust creams nannies pile in the closet.
The world outside your bed keeps growing. Beneath the covers your cuticles recede. Cold plumbing welters your infections.
Everything is a job without instructions. Everyone is a boss whose piss becomes your vision.
Nightmares linked endlessly preposition to preposition, the comma as perpetrator, the right ten seconds of trauma the same as ten million.
Risk your prose as purple or bleed so stupid everyone hides.
Pretension means you write.
To write like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1owrlQlLExY
This: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLOy4_tzXHY
The fragment is a halo for music only your skin can spoil.
Go past your bandages, regardless.
That there is edification in the art itself is a perverse lie. Gut the singer of this song.
Study process how a corpse smells.
The cluck dumb telling of your vice all willy nilly.
The costume that fears itself.
The king scalped by his crown.
Say fuck yes after every line or admit you are asleep.
Revision of revision, you edit when you blink.
Inkling for the Tarot as porn.
Cacophony bares little beyond cacophony: yikes and good.
The consonant as vehicle of hate to pace typing. Alliteration works during scenes of castration or disembowelment. All that is allowed is disembowelment.
Marginalize your tinker.
Don’t write to be digested.
Be alive worse than anything.
What you conjure while giddy places little connect.
The world ain't your business. Breathing ain't your business.
To search assward for yesterday’s supper using a blowtorch for light and to live in the resulting wet maze of tubes.
You didn’t have enough grins tied to your birth. You found a pencil and stuck it in your importance.
People study to be lawyers.
You are glitter succulent for page.
You’ve got microcosms in your stammer.
Blown eventually through a tube of hair.
Poets lick their gravestones, deserve less than gravestones. Poets for the order of their own mass grave.
I have a second prostate blanking soot behind my eyes.
Shucks about everything.
And so your mother lay bleeding and pale in the tangled sheets and the women in their bonnets and house dresses before her crossed themselves and muttered prayers unto her soul as you red faced and dripping announced yourself wailing into the world. And your father called from his sorrow that he could never again gaze upon this woman, nor could he again name her but with a strangled sound, and when with his moans and gnashing he commanded her taken away they wrapped her and carried her in those very sheets, blood matted and sticky with viscera, fly gathered already, to the edge of what was considered the yard. And so too were all images and possessions of this woman carried in bed sheets to the yard and set afire. Of this woman there now remains but a single marker; and one may find some remnant of her stone, even now, if they understand where the pasture once lay. And your father regarded you from the edge of the room, you the last vestige of this lost life, and he said unto his sister, “What shall I do with this one?” and only after some consideration did your aunt say, “I will tend after him. I will tend after the both of you.” And how in the brief years to follow your aunt was carried off in a fever and then your father was himself compelled to the soil, his blood misted before the plow and into the mysterious overgrowth his hired man fled with the woman your father wed to raise you, to instruct you, whose image you carry even now within your mind as “Mother,” and so it was you toddled into the dust and lay upon this man and when they found you against your father, in the full gaze of the sun, they said you were “red with [your] father.”
Born of the same womb,
Some warped ovum
Twins in tissue, equal parts
blood and tonsil
A brother kind, lungs healthful
Arms malformed—a blue-faced horror—
The eater: wrangled freak
Black-cord monster
Mother husk, her dying
Wish for a total terror death
1. First snow, reading lizard in the red chamber, is making love to me.
2. Is the moleskine daily diary for butterflies? A day is always another word, or another door.
3. You came here to create me. In chalk.
4. AT A TYPICALLY UNCLEAN LONDON TRAIN STATION: Tiny mushrooms grow / Hoo / of my ring binder book.
5. Love means love you. Not really.
6. My fingers tell me to smile. We are savages, you quite understand!
8. Other bad habits: Check if I am arousing. Pretending to make phone calls. The wind is southerly and I am sad.
9. Books – long for; Cloudberry flower; Homeward; Ice--first meeting with, white reflection from; Moons!
10. Jargon, n. 1: The art of London spread out in the commonplace.
13. Perceptible eyes would probably see my blueberry pancakes. That someone is Chinese.
15. You emerge at six in print, twittering.
16. AT ANOTHER RANDOM TRAIN STATION: desire can be cultivated with the right kind of new year.
19. Thank you for breakfast and sharing my very own copy of the furious noon.
20. I saw the sink: Last night street hawkers sold hot mangoes, lizards and moons. Did you buy some grapes?
21. Now, the code, or perfume. Knock Knock Knock Knock Knock. Coffee-stained mad!
22. Marginalia, underlining – tell me about John Dryden. What can you find in a life of used books?
23. Glorious London. Even the moles on my legs sing. I'm not the code, or uncut diamonds. Are you really hard already?
24. Yes, I might even blossom, invisibly. No woman loves sitting alone or clearing your rooms. You are addicted to my favorite dresses and that audio book?
25. I behold, upon the Window onto the Humanities: How should I write this, write the world.
26. And I would challenge the untranslatable Virtuous Woman I cannot be.
27. I said: My beau is Spring. OUTDOORS. We can totally hear Henry James.
28. Watching my favorite dresses change the direction of the wind. May is in my flesh, or is it merely tattooed?
29. This is making me premier: Unexpected themes and strawberry muffins. And I find myself cut into a phone. I have the end of the morning. My poem is based on a London song.
30. You are now published. You can be made into a black miniskirt.
Orange rot and now given even. Over rot as now given even. Rotted on turned. And now done. Now or worm. Given in vented even now. Even vented even now. Orange vented even rot. Rotted even now turns. As silence. Now or worms. Given in veiled evening now. Even veiled evening now. Rot over turned turns even done. Or rots. Turned under rot now evened done. And now done. Now over worms. Done over now even. Now on worms. Or rotted. Worms over rotted means. Given in vented even now. In now. Vented even now turning even done. Even venting even now. Now our worms. Even vending even now. Vending even done in now given. Even vendors evened now. Now on worms. Or rots and now given evens. Vented evening now turning evening down. Even vented even now is now given. Rot over turning. Rot even now turning.
Watch weather report for heavy rain. On the day before, drink NOTHING. No beverages of any kind. Eat no soup or broth. Eat only steamed vegetables with soft noodles or bread. Wait for rain. Set your alarm to wake in the middle of the night, and then sit by the window peering into the dark sky with binoculars. Think about your first memory of being thirsty. Take notes, go back to sleep.
Wait for rain. You are still not drinking the next day and you are very thirsty. When rain arrives sit by the window. Close your eyes, take your pulse, hear the rain, feel your blood. Imagine that the water you hear coming to earth will never touch your lips, can never quench the dryness that is your mouth. Were you ever so thirsty that you were in pain? Open your eyes, take notes.
Go out into the rain. Lie on the ground. Look into the sky through binoculars with your mouth open. Drink DIRECTLY from the air while watching the streaming drops fall onto the binocular lens. Open an umbrella and take notes to the beating of rain. You are a drought that is cured. You are a body sponging back your life. Shape your three sets of notes into one poem or three.
One day the boy on his boat on this lake fished up a fish up in his boat but the fish, when he fished it up and when he looked with his eyes at this fish, this fish, he could see, it was not like most fish: this fish, it was half fish, half bird, is what this fish that he fished up was. Where its side fins should have been there were wings where these fins should have been. And its mouth, this fish mouth, it was more of a beak than it was a mouth. And it had feet, this fish did, that were three toes clawed and that this fish, when it was fished up out of the lake and when it was reeled in and when the boy held it up to the sun's light for his eyes to see it, he could see that this fish, it was part bird, part fish.
What kind of a fish is this? the boy said this in his own head. This fish is just as much a bird as it is a fish.
What, the boy then thought, should I do with such a fish?
It's not a fish, the boy thought. I come out on the lake, I row out on this boat, to fish for fish, the boy heard his own voice say.
What kind of a fish has wings where its fins are meant to be?
He held the fish up in his hand and spread its bird wings out for all to see.
There was no one else there to see this.
There was no one else there to hear this.
2. Empty it out.
3. Open the door.
4. Walk into the house.
"Room uh happy pie," Tink uhs. "Chair so solo," Flit plies. "Flier rain fly ump," Tink fews. "Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh," bear skin rug says to Flit. "Kio cry," kios Flit. "Kio Flit," fluts Tink. "Happy sap draping murble bulb," Flit nuks. "Campy calm four blunks," rugs Tink. "Mulch mulch mulch," mulches Flit. "Smells like a happy pie in this room, a pie with berries of a sort," spider in the corner says to bear skin rug. "Soft fos so fto," Tink oses. "Ket yer blankets blunk," Flit roses. "Sill win dows pie haps," roses Tink. "Spinner for the corder," Flit falls. "Skinner and sum rugs," jules Tink. "So solo chair sung and and," andlyands Flit. "That chair appears soft and useful," bear skin rug says to spider in the corner. "Come calm gum go," Tink flits. "Shappy shap throats with happy me," Flit tinks. "Browner," keyes Tink. "Murchy mulk in back your jars of you," Flit softlies. "Tst tst tst tst tst tst. Tst tst," circles Tink. "Can you believe the rain melting down the window?" spider in the corner asks bear skin rug. "Closeted close my clubs and clor color closal," Flit opens. "Hook ook! Ook!" looks Tink. "Hreak ckreak and murky solo chair in hear me," creaks Flit. "Mufs on rain and me you creak us," Tink qualms. "Wonce fain ralls and me and you Tink us," Flit kets. "Enough crying. Sh. Enough sh crying sh. Sh sh sh. Enough crying sh. Sh. Shenough cryingsh. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Eno sh ugh crying. Sh. Enough cry sh ing. C sh r sh y sh i sh n sh g crying crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough screaming. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crawling. Sh. Enough crying. Sh sh sh sh sh sh. Enough enough crying crying sh sh. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh. Enough," bear skin rug says to Flit. "Shtopsh shcrawlingsh!" Tink kinks. "Sh. Lanky blunk here uwrapped and rain rain rain," Flit confs. "Cry cry," irms Tink. "Halm clappy chair me crawl soft wrop," urks Flit. "Happy gie closed and," Tink guhs. "Brown chair cher," Flit plinks. "Flit is happy enough it seems. Does it seem to you? Here are some questions? Are we answering you?" spider in the corner asks bear skin rug. "Cry cry flier cry rain fly creak ump," Tink lookilews. "Kiosker lump it cry some gummy sub," skers Flit. "Kay ef," flubs Tink. "Drippy sap lappy room," Flit cunks. "Clam calm clam calm calm clam," culs Tink. "Much much," fetches Flit. "Toes fossy fossy fto," Tink blows. "Kiln yer kets tunk," Flit knows. "Shrilly dows does you you you," does Tink. "?" bear skin rug asks spider in the corner. "Spider lake and rug for it," Flit fills. "Bare bear ber ser cher nr r," ehs Tink. "Pie," happilies Flit. "Come calm shay a frin," Tink films. "Lap happy happily hap shop," Flit throws. "Brown room sill win," eyes Tink. "Blankets should calm this. I believe this room will seem sparklier when the windowsill lets in enough light for Tink and Flit to romp as they ought, and for me to remain cornered and for you, bear skin rug, to remain murky and like a blanket dropped on the floor," spider in the corner says to bear skin rug. "Opesed closen jars open chars chers," Flit lies. "The windowsill should blanket a calm room for us," bear skin rug says to spider in the corner. "Plt thlp fltp plth flth thlth. Thst," cls Tink. "I am toe counting these Tinks and Flits of ours. Ten each, five per," spider in the corner says to bear skin rug. "Reseted loose why flubs and color pleath," Flit pens. "Will they seem to you chair-sit-on-able soon and off my soft though murky backside for a time?" bear skin rug asks spider in the corner. "Look lOok loOk looK," Tink blinks. "Share cher char chair shit sit," wits Flit. "Enough crying. Sh. Enough crying. Sh," bear skin rug says to Flit. "Ruf blenkut photo phold it," Tink thinks. "A browner, calmer, creakier room next time, could we find a lesser one next time rug?" spider in the corner asks bear skin rug. "And me and you Tink us," Flit touches. "And me and you and me and you and I and Tink and Flit and you and us," Tink feels. "And you and us and me and us and you and you you you you Tink Tink Tink Tink Ti," nks Flit. "U," us Tink. "F," s Fl. "iTin," k T.
Blue listened under even. Bent level under even. Listened in silence turned even now even done. Under now done even rot. Even vent even now. Blue even now turned. Level even veiled, even listened. Under now done evened rot. Evened veiled even now. Listened is silence turned, even now even done. In now. Silence is listening even now, even curved even. Turned under rot now evened done. Evened vented even now. Now on worms. Even now, even now. Done over now evened. Under now done, even rot. Now over worms. Done over now even. Even veiled, even now. Rot over turned. Even bent even now. Vent even now turns. Even vented even now. Now our worms. Bent level until even. Even veiled evened now. Now our worm. Turn under rot now evened done. Level even, veiled, even level. Even veiled even now. Veiled even, in light evening, done. Evening veiled even now.
The noise in the pig. The pig in the noise.
The time for pig time.
The end of the start of pig time.
The time of the pig thorn.
The mouth drooling in the heart of the pig thorns.
The heart drooling in the shape of the pig.
The hour of the pig light. The arson in the pig dark.
The noise of the pig in the human head.
The noise of the human in the pig head.
The pig fever in the human brain.
The pig light in the human eye.
The pig eye in the dark staring.
The lemon of the pig. The glory and run-off of the pig.
The pig wall alone on the human beach.
The human sand pink and the pig wall burnt.
The human hand scurrying in the pig night.
The mouth drooling in a human night.
The hour of the pig hour.
The hour of the blood drool.
The hour of the pig drool slipping from the light into the dark.
The pig eye staring down.
The human eye staring at the pig eye stare down.
The human spew in the pig head.
The human dark in the pig light.
The peeled lemon of the pig. The hour of the pig lemon.
The crown of pig thorns on the pink sand.
The beach light bright in the pig eye.
Jerry’s Daddy, looking half dead, sat in the kitchen smoking a Camel and sketching comic faces on a napkin with a stubby pencil. There was quite an odor about him, mostly of sour, poorly washed clothes. A thin white paste leaked from his mouth. Jerry sat at the far end of the dining table. “Where have you been?”
“All over the place. Don’t worry about that.”
“How did you get into the house?”
“The basement window. I was careful, I was quiet, I didn’t want to wake you up in the middle of the night. I scraped myself, but don’t worry, I don’t bleed anymore.”
“I assumed you were dead.”
“It’s an assumption, Jerry. You never knew this, but at times I had to rest. I came here, a familiar place. I stayed in the basement. I’ve got a little niche back there in the corner.”
“That’s crazy. What’s that white stuff you’re drooling?”
“I don’t know. It just started happening a few years ago. I know it smells bad.”
“Why don’t you bathe? I’ll take you upstairs. You can get into the tub. I’ll give you some soap.”
“The least bit of water on my skin burns like acid.”
“Right. I’m sure it does. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“I’ll have a sip or two. If I drink too much I get animated…. What kind of coffee do people drink these days? Is it still Maxwell House and Folgers?”
“I get better stuff. It costs twice as much. It’s organic.”
“It’s what?”
“Organic.”
“What in the shit does that mean?”
“They don’t use pesticides on the coffee plants. They don’t treat the beans with chemicals.”
Jerry’s Daddy watched him pour three scoops of beans into his Braun grinder and held his ears when it was turned on. “Jesus Christ, what is that thing? Cyclones in Hell that don’t make that much noise.”
“It’s an electric grinder. You buy the whole beans and you grind them yourself. It tastes fresher.”
“Have we gone to the moon yet?”
“We have, yes. In 1969. Where the hell have you been?”
“Fantastic. I knew they would. How old is Kennedy now? He must be eighty or ninety.”
“He was assassinated.”
“You’re kidding.”
“In Dallas. A little guy with Cuban sympathies shot him dead in his limousine. The top was down.”
“Somebody shot Kennedy? Hard to believe.”
“What am I going to do with you? This is a small place. Just a kitchen, a tiny parlor, one bedroom and a bath upstairs.”
“I said I would stay in the basement.”
“The bathroom is upstairs. You’d be going up and down all night.”
“I don’t need a bathroom. I’m dried up. Kidneys don’t work.”
“That’s interesting, Daddy. Here’s your coffee. I’m taking you somewhere, a facility where you can get some help.”
“I don’t need help. I’m fine.”
“What will you eat down there, slugs? Roaches? I’m taking you somewhere. Let me make a few phone calls.”
Jerry fished an iPhone from his robe pocket and spoke into its receiver: “Social Services, Geriatric.” He looked intently at the little screen for an answer.
Daddy pointed at the iPhone. “What in the hell is that?”
Several social service geriatric sites had scrolled up and Jerry wasn’t paying attention. “What is what? I’m busy looking something up.”
“Don’t tell me they’ve got little bitty televisions now. Why did you talk to it?”
“It’s a telephone and it’s also a small computer. It gives me information about things to do with you. Right now it’s telling me to call St. Vincent’s, which it says has a good reputation.”
“I read about them in Popular Science, the little computing machine of the future you could hold in your hand. No wires. Dick Tracy had a wrist phone. It might have been a radio too. I don’t remember.”
Jerry said, “Fifty years, Daddy. You’ve been gone that long.”
“Was I.…? What about your mother? Whatever became of her?”
“She died in eighty nine. Cancer of the colon.”
“I bet she suffered. I’m sorry I couldn’t be with her. I wish I cared more, but I lost all my feelings when I moved on. Physically, mentally, nothing there.”
Jerry punched in the number for St. Vincent’s and waited for an answer. “I was with her,” he said, spite on his fleshy face. “I took care of emptying her colostomy bag and trying to talk her out of taking an overdose of her pain pills.”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t fun.”
“It wasn’t…. Hello? St.Vincent’s? I’m calling about a situation I’m having with my father. He’s been gone fifty years and now he’s back and he needs care. Are your services free?”
“I’m not going there, Jerry. Think of something else.”
Jerry shushed him with a finger to the lip and listened for awhile with his ear to the iPhone. “I’ve already thought about this for a long time, in case you came back. I can’t take care of you. It’s way too late. You’re going to St. Vincent’s.”
Daddy took a small sip of coffee. “Did you ever hook up with a woman and get married?”
Jerry pressed the End button and slid home the cover of the iPhone. “The damned place is closed three days a week. They won’t be there till Thursday. I got a recording.”
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Find a woman and get married.”
“No, I’ve been going it alone. It’s noon already. We’ve got to make some kind of arrangements.”
“I’m living the dream. I couldn’t be better. I don’t need any arrangements. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“I’ll call them back on Thursday.”
“Son, are you religious? Do you belong or go to any church? All that Heaven and Hell shit?”
“No. I don’t believe any of that.”
“Let me tell you, I’ve been to Hell.”
“Of course you have.”
Jerry began to make a sandwich. He took sliced ham, mayonnaise, yellow mustard and a leaf of lettuce from the fridge, placed them on the kitchen counter and dropped two slices of split-top white bread into the toaster. “Go on, Daddy, tell me all about Hell.”
“The first morning I woke up there I felt more rested than I had in years. My big surprise—there wasn’t enough fire to roast a marshmallow. The place that terrified us had burned out long ago and a cool drizzle had turned everything into a slimy black tar, still warm enough to burn your feet, but that’s it. I saw familiar faces right away, friends from home. They were in single file, pushed along by the Devil’s trustees, on their way to one of several Hell-based factories for a long, steamy day of work. There were two Hells, one for women and one for men. A river of boiling plasma separated them.”
“I think St. Vincent’s is the place for you. Good priests, good nuns. They’ll treat you well.”
“I’m not finished with Hell yet, Son.”
“All right.”
“There were a few children to be seen, mostly males, idling their way through eternity, too young to work, too old for Limbo. There were no clouds, tobacco or animals. And the condemned ate half-cooked flesh soaked in mother’s milk at every meal. People were trying to distill whiskey down there. They were going to call it Deep Shaft Bourbon—Bottled in Hell, but you can’t make good whiskey without corn. And for corn, you need good water. The Styx doesn’t have it. It’s eighty feet under the ground. It gets every drop of toxic effluent from the City.”
“Is that it, your treatise on Hell?”
“It’s my report. I was there. Look, I’m going down for a nap. I can’t hold my eyes open.”
Daddy struggled up from the table without help from Jerry and shuffled to the basement door. “Good night, Jerry.”
“Daddy, it isn’t noon yet.”
“Oh, don’t worry, it’s dark enough in the basement.” He opened the basement door. “Don’t try to raise me in the morning. I’ll be sleeping in.”
“All right.”
Daddy stepped onto the basement stairs and closed the door behind him.
Red even done. Rot even done. Even now even now. Done now over even. Red now evened now. Even violence even now. Now now. Done now, over even. Even now even veiled. Now over worms. Even even. Now worms. Even evened even. Violence in our loss even now curved even. Even violence even rot. Now rot. Now over rot. Now always rot. Always loss always worms always always. Now over rot. Over vent even rot. Even vent even now. Red venting even now even done. Now our worms. Even veiled even now. Violence is our level, even now, curved even. Even violence even now. Even over worms. Now over worms. Now over, worms. Done over now, evened. Now ours, worm. Over vented, evened rot. Worms over rot means silence. Even vented even now. Even now.
Almost as long to realize Japan is closer than New Jersey.
Suggestions for the weather should be addressed to Jesus
c/o Hollywood. Enclose proof of veganism for rush
processing.
The penalty for complaints is 300 hours of Pilates
and a double shot of wheatgrass in the quinoa.
Examples include:
Too many pinches of salt in the ocean.
Too much blue in an empty sky.
Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling
all around me, and me unable to stomach
that I might catch five but never ten thousand.
So I drop my hands to my sides and wait
to be buried. I open a book and the words
spring and taunt. Flashes—motel, lapidary,
piranha—of every story, every poem I’ll never
know well enough to conjure in sleep.
What’s the point of words if I can’t
own them all? I toss book after book
into my imaginary trashcan fire.
Or I think I’ll learn piano. At the first lesson,
we’re clapping whole and half notes
and this is childish, I’m better than this.
I’d like to leave playing Ravel. I’d like
to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit.
I have standards. Then on Saturday,
I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or
we watch a documentary on Antarctica.
The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin.
Everyone speaks English. Everyone names
a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft
on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once
and swore it was a great adventure. It was.
I think of how I’ll never go to Antarctica,
mainly because I don’t much want to. But
I should want to. I should be the girl
with a raft on her back. When I think
of all the mountains and monuments
and skyscapes I haven’t seen, all the trains
I should take, all the camels and mopeds
and ferries I should ride, all the scorching
hikes I should nearly die on, I press
my body down, down into the vast green
couch. If I step out the door, the infinity
of what I’ve missed will zorro me across
the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes
I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small
suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself.
Metaphorically, of course. I’m no loon.
Look—even my awestruck is half-assed.
But I’m so tired of the small steps—
the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer
hoarding, the one exquisite sentence
in a forest of exquisite sentences.
There is a globe welling up inside of me.
Mountain ranges ridging my skin,
oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still
long enough, I could become my own world.
 |
In a fume cupboard you could bomb yourself with different kinds of healing smoke. You could dial the oxygen all the way down and get a pure dose of medicine, and even if you fainted the cabinet would be flushed of its chemicals and rich oxygen would get poured in until you revived.
I was keen to try one.
I pried open the lock and entered it for several deep inhalations, cramming my body into the narrow cylinder. Usually the most potent fumes had long since blown through. The sanitation department did not regularly recharge these chambers. But the wooden walls of these units supposedly held smell remnants and if I inhaled with enough force I might pull the sharp medicinal air into my lungs.
I crouched, took a hard suck. I pressed my face into the blackened wood, mouthed it, then pulled in with all the force I had. I stepped back and tried rapid, shallow breaths, holding my nose to feel the full force of this treated air.
Nothing came to me, just dust. It was like standing inside a person’s body, not my own, except it smelled like nothing.
On the inside wall was carved a cluster of graffiti. I could not readily decipher it, but it looked familiar, something I was sure I once knew. It was too short in width to be a word, and too complex to be a single letter. Someone had made this symbol with a knife, and an oily substance had since filled the gouges, blackening the shape.
When I scraped out some of the gunk it was more clear to me. The graffiti was the whole alphabet superimposed on itself, a tumor of all our letters stacked on top of each other in one stifling clot. It was as if the entire alphabet had imploded into a single, dark point.
I DECLARE WAR ON REALISM, I DECLARE WAR ON A WORN-OUT JOY, I DECLARE WAR ON EVERYTHING.
SOMETIMES YOU GET DRUNK EVERY NIGHT FOR TWO WEEKS, SOMETIMES YOU MAKE OUT WITH A DUDE IN A CAB AND THEN YOU END UP DOING DRUGS AND PULLING YOUR DICK OUT IN A BAR YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO BEFORE, SOMETIMES YOU BUY MORE WHISKEY AND GO BACK TO YOUR PLACE WHERE YOU FUCK AROUND WITH THE DUDE IN YOUR LOFT WHILE YOUR ROOMMATE’S FRIEND SNORES ON THE COUCH BENEATH YOU, SOMETIMES YOU DON’T GO HOME FOR 36 HOURS, SOMETIMES YOU FORGET THAT YOU HAVE THINGS TO DO OTHER THAN GOING TO WORK AND GETTING DRUNK & LAID, SOMETIMES YOU REALIZE YOU HAVE THE CAPACITY TO MANIFEST THE FUTURE SIMPLY BY MAKING THE DECLARATION, SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO REALIZE THAT POP MUSICK IS A FUTURE THAT WE’RE ALL AFRAID OF, AND THE POP MUSIC THE LITERATI ARE NOT AFRAID OF IS ONLY FALSE, SOMETIMES WE ALL KNOW THAT THE WORLD IS ALREADY OVER AND FEEL GREAT ABOUT IT, HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS THING CALLED CAPITALISM? IT’S STUPID. THERE’S A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO WANT TO TELL YOU WHY IT’S STUPID, MAYBE YOU SHOULD LISTEN, SOMETIMES YOU KNOW THERE’S FINALLY A CLASS WAR GOING ON AND LIFE STARTS TO MAKE SENSE FOR THE FIRST TIME, SOMETIMES YOU WAKE UP NEXT TO SOMEBODY AND YOU DON’T REMEMBER THEIR NAME, SOMETIMES YOUR BEST FRIENDS SEND YOU THE BEST TEXT MESSAGES YOU’VE EVER READ IN YOUR LIFE, EVERYTHING IS SURPRISING, SOMETIMES WHAT LIFE AMOUNTS TO IS NOTHING BEYOND WHAT YOU CAN REMEMBER, SOMETIMES WHAT LIFE AMOUNTS TO IS NOTHING BEYOND WHAT YOU’VE FORGOTTEN AND YOU FEEL GREAT ABOUT IT.
SOMETIMES YOU JUST DON’T DO ANYTHING, SOMETIMES YOU TRY TO MAKE PANCAKES AND YOU USE BAKING SODA INSTEAD OF BAKING POWDER AND THEY TASTE LIKE POISON, SOMETIMES YOU READ NICK LAND ESSAYS ON THE BUS AND YOU ACTUALLY LAUGH OUT LOUD, SOMETIMES YOU KEEP FORGETTING TO DOWNLOAD A PDF OF NIETSZCHE’S BIRTH OF TRAGEDY SO YOU CAN PUT IT ON YOUR PHONE TO READ WHILE YOU DRINK ALONE AT THE BAR, SOMETIMES YOU FORGET ABOUT LITERATURE COMPLETELY BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO BUSY FUCKING WITH SOME CONCEPTUAL EXPERIMENT THAT ASSUAGES YOU OF ALL MORALITY OR GUILT, SOMETIMES THIS MAKES MORE SENSE THAN ANYTHING YOU’VE WRITTEN OR READ, EVER.
LADY GAGA IS A FACADE.
LIFE IS ONLY FLOATING. FAME IS IRRELEVANT. STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING. MOMENTUM AS CONTRAST TO REALITY. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WE CAN GO ANYWHERE WE WANT TO. THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO DIE BEFORE WE CAN REST.
You should read NOÖ 13 if you like dance-offs, Russian salads, laundromats outside of burnt down malls, people who give you their ADD medication for your birthday, Ivan Lendl nostalgia, Hawaiians with machine guns, fake boyfriends, people who marry houses, confused police, sisters who are boxes of snakes, sisters who threaten you with ginsu knives, pummelhorsing social compromise, meat screams, oysters collected by widows, letters to jailed Lil Wayne, hearts too full of apples and wind, slut bags, triangle booth sandwiches, fucktrys, lung balloons, the bicycle in the wrong part of the neighborhood, the fast snapping motion of a neck during the fickle stages of a swan-dive, whiskey & chocolate, roller hockey coaches, furniture apocalypses, people who swallow entire friends, and eerie floating underwear.
She has never cared about anything. She still doesn’t, but this, right now, is something to do. She imagines checking into a love hotel alone, spreading herself out on the bed, impaling herself with plastic sex objects from the vending machine, Ravel blasting from the hotel speakers, sending videos of herself to Hyde. She imagines how much he hates her, imagines him associating that hate with the things that he loves
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music makes me feel lonely
Your music
Makes me feel lonely
Picking a lemon
Late at night
My heart tightens
I fear nature
Your music makes me feel lonely
I must be responsible for it
I’m alive
I have this hair helmet on
I’m so alive
I say yes to the megaplex
You say it’s awful isn’t it awful
I say yeah
So what. Something sentimental
This place
I agree
Huge
We’re gonna go into the movie
. . .
The day is long enough
The day is long enough
The day is so long enough
To contain all this and more
When I couldn’t sleep
Next to you and I
Said I wanted to cry
And you said I should
And I looked down and breathed
And then I did cry
And you tried to touch me
And you did
And you tried to kiss me
And you sort of did
And I was so scared
That I love you and you don’t love me
I felt stupid when I put my pants on
And I felt stupid when I put my shirt on
And I felt stupid when I went to the other room to get my book
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig
The preamble to which I had read to you
When I still thought we might fuck
And I felt stupid when your door
Slammed too loud behind me
But when I hit the night air
I was relieved.
You read a lot. You have a hunger.
I like it. Your hunger makes
It possible for you to see things.
You must have seen how stupid I felt
How helpless.
Women.
I don’t know, Jake.
I do not understand women.
Right now I feel like one.
I don’t know what women want
But I know that the ones I like
Are not the hags
Who put one arm around you
(In this scenario you
Are the younger woman)
And say You get to a point in your life.
Fuck those bitches
I am counterpart to the Visible Human Project, I froze my
psyche in a gelatin-water bath, laid it on a slab, sliced it
with the solid-beam technological blade along the axial
plane, re-stacked it with 0.174 mm gaps between, photo-
graphed in position each revealing strip producing a 40
gigabyte 3-D holographic sculpture of the psychological
machine: rages, urges, fantasies, addictions, compulsions,
fears, each strip pulls to strangle or kiss you, dear reader,
or to label you fool, approach cautiously in curator’s un-
forgiving shadow-less light this impregnable solid glass
cube, its images wound, here is the passageway to your
private, painstakingly thorough tomographic exhibit, step
through, walk forward, for nobody but you does it glitter.
